"Lottie, Lottie," calls out Addie from the drawing-room, where she has been finishing letters for the post, a ring of the coming spring in her fresh young voice, "tell Poll to put on her hat and cloak quickly, and we'll all three have a scamper through the grove. The pond behind Sallymount farm ought to be frozen now; we might have a grand slide on the sly."
"Oh, but, Addie, don't you know Poll's gone? She ordered the carriage after luncheon, packed up her ball-dress, and went off to the Wynyards' for the ball. Didn't she tell you?"
The snow has gone from the ground, the frost from the air, blustering March is paving the way for tearful April. Miss Pauline Lefroy, luxuriously basking in an easy-chair by the fire, a limp manuscript resting on her knee, is murmuring words of sweetest love in a low, monotonous voice to Mr. Everard, stretched on the rug at her feet--words which reach Mrs. Armstrong in detached sentences, as she sits by the window, sewing, a sufficiently listless and preoccupied chaperone to satisfy even the most exacting lover.
"'And you like this ring? Ah, it has indeed a luster since your eyes have shone on it! Henceforth hold me, sweet enchantress, the Slave of the Ring!'" he answers, in impassioned accents.
"Oh, dear," muses Addie, "what high-flown rubbish! I don't think such wooing would win me. Pauline must be of different metal--rather soft metal, I should say. 'Sweet enchantress,' 'slave of the ring!' I'm glad Tom didn't make such a fool of himself when--when we were courting. Heigh-ho, what a long afternoon it is! I wonder will the boys turn up early? Robert has not been here for two Saturdays running. I--"
"'There is something glorious in the heritage of command. A man who has ancestors is like a representative of the past,'" says Pauline, in haughty melodramatic accents.
"Stuff, Pauline, stuff!" mutters her sister, impatiently tugging at her knotted thread. "Precious heritage of command our ancestors have given us! Nice representatives some of our forefathers were! If Bob or Hal took to representing them, I wonder what--"
"'Ah, Pauline, not to the past, but to the future looks true nobility, and finds its blazon in posterity.'"
"Come, that sounds like nonsense, as well as I can make out. Why, Jack Everard, will you always speak to Pauline as if your windpipe were padded with cotton-wool; it can't make her love you, and it is so exasperating when you want to hear--"