Pending my friend’s reply, it may easily be believed that I waited with no small anxiety and impatience, none the less that the fact of my being under the same roof with Miss Merlin gave me no more access to her society, no more information regarding her movements, than if we had been on different continents. The very first morning after her arrival she was off to hunt before I was out of bed, and returned so quietly as to frustrate my insidious intentions of waylaying her in the passage. Justine too, either taken to task by her mistress, or on some definite calculations of her own, avoided my presence altogether, and never gave me an opportunity of exchanging a syllable with her. Miss Lushington, whom I boldly confronted in her own dominions, was obviously on her high horse, and ill at ease. There could be no question but that, notwithstanding her simple and retiring habits, in accordance with the strict seclusion in which she lived, Miss Merlin’s arrival had completely altered the tone and destroyed the cordiality of the whole establishment.
True to his post, my letter must have found Quizby at the “Hat and Umbrella,” for within eight-and-forty hours of its dispatch, I received his answer; written of course on Club paper, and sealed with our handsome Club seal—a beautiful device formed of the domestic _insignia_ from which we take our name. I opened it eagerly, and after a few commonplace lines of inquiry and gossip, I arrived, so to speak, at the marrow of its contents.
“You could not have applied, my dear Softly,” said my correspondent, “to any man in London better qualified to give you the information you require. Not only have I known Miss Merlin almost from childhood, but it was my lot in early life, when the heart is fresh and the feelings susceptible, to be by no means insensible to her charms. You ask me whether she is good-looking; and this, did I not know your extreme diffidence and scrupulous delicacy of feeling, would seem a strange question from one who is under the same roof with its object. Beauty is a matter of opinion. I need scarcely say that many years ago I thought her ‘beautiful exceedingly.’ She was then a tall pale girl, with the most thorough-bred head and neck you ever saw, with the grace and elasticity of a nymph, combined with the dignity of an empress. So haughty a young woman it has never been my fate to come across. She had full dark eyes, and very silky dark hair; regular features of the severe classical type, and the sad mournful expression, that had a great effect on me at that period. I need not be ashamed to confess it, whilst I remained an eleven-stone man I was romantic; but, like many others, increasing weight has brought with it, I trust, increasing wisdom, and I have not the slightest doubt myself that adipose matter conduces vastly to a proper equilibrium of the mind. I thought otherwise once, and Miss Merlin’s dark eyes would have led me to follow her to the end of the world—nay, even over those ghastly fences, which then, as now, it seemed to be her greatest delight to ‘negotiate,’ as I think you hunting men call it in your extraordinary vernacular. She had a wonderfully graceful figure too, as a young thing, and the narrowest, most flexible hands and feet you ever beheld. I have waltzed with her many a time—_moi qui vous parle_; and to think of the delicious swing with which she went down a room to the strains of Jullien and Kœnig, the musical wonders of _our_ day, almost makes me feel as if I could waltz again. When she bridled her taper neck, and put one little foot forward from beneath her draperies, she looked like a filly just going to start for the Oaks.