Hannah smoothed down her apron once more, and made another bob of a curtsy, apparently intended for the stranger. “Miss,” said Hannah, gravely, “that’s Mr Louis--bless his heart!”
Then the old woman turned and went in, leaving the girls by themselves in the garden. They were a little timid of the great calm and silence; they almost fancied they were “by themselves,”--not in the garden only, but in this whole apparent noiseless world.
And with an excitement which they could not control, the two girls hastened in to the Old Lodge, and to Miss Bridget’s dim parlour, where the two candles shed their faint summer-evening light over Mr Atheling reading an old newspaper, and Mamma reclining in the great old easy-chair. The abstracted mirror, as loftily withdrawn from common life as Mr Endicott, refused to give any reflection of these good people sitting far below in their middle-aged and respectable quietness, but owned a momentary vision of Agnes and Marian, as they came in with a little haste and eagerness at the half-open door.
But, after all, to be very much excited, to hasten in to tell one’s father and mother, with the heart beating faster than usual against one’s breast, and to have one’s story calmly received with an “Indeed, my dear!” is rather damping to youthful enthusiasm; and really, to tell the truth, there was nothing at all extraordinary in the fact of Louis passing by a door so near the great house which was his own distasteful home. It was not at all a marvellous circumstance; and as for his salutation, though that was remarkable, and caught their imagination, Marian whispered that she had no doubt it was Louis’s “way.”
They began, accordingly, to look at the slender row of books in one small open shelf above the little cabinet. The books were in old rich bindings, and were of a kind of reading quite unknown to Agnes and Marian. There were two (odd) volumes of the _Spectator_, _Rasselas_, the Poems of Shenstone, the Sermons of Blair; besides these, a French copy of Thomas-à-Kempis, the _Holy Living and Dying_ of Jeremy Taylor, and one of the quaint little books of Sir Thomas Browne. Thrust in hastily beside these ancient and well-attired volumes were two which looked surreptitious, and which were consequently examined with the greatest eagerness. One turned out, somewhat disappointingly, to be a volume of Italian exercises, an old, old school-book, inscribed, in a small, pretty, but somewhat faltering feminine handwriting--handwriting of the last century--with the name of Anastasia Rivers, with a B. A. beneath, which doubtless stood for Bridget Atheling, though it seemed to imply, with a kindly sort of blundering comicality sad enough now, that Anastasia Rivers, though she was no great hand at her exercises, had taken a degree. The other volume was of more immediate interest. It was one of those good and exemplary novels, ameliorated Pamelas, which virtuous old ladies were wont to put into the hands of virtuous young ones, and which was calculated to “instruct as well as to amuse” the unfortunate mind of youth. Marian seized upon this _Fatherless Fanny_ with an instant appropriation, and in ten minutes was deep in its endless perplexities. Agnes, who would have been very glad of the novel, languidly took down the _Spectator_ instead. Yes, we are obliged to confess--languidly; for, with an excited mind upon a lovely summer night, with all the stars shining without, and only two pale candles within, and Mamma visibly dropping to sleep in the easy-chair--who, we demand, would not prefer, even to Steele and Addison, the mazy mysteries of the Minerva Press?