“Heavens! what an actress she would make!” said somebody before them.

“That’s genius,” said somebody behind them; “but what a subject to waste it upon!”

“Very bad taste, I must say, to talk about such a thing here,” said somebody beside them.  “However, one can excuse a great deal to beauty like that.”

Surrey sat still, and felt as though he were on fire, filled with an insane desire to seize her in one arm like a knight of old, and hew his way through these beings, and out of this place, into some solitary spot where he could seat her and kneel at her feet, and die there if she refused to take him up; filled with all the sweet, extravagant, delicious pain that thrills the heart, full of passion and purity, of a young man who begins to love the first, overwhelming, only love of a lifetime.

CHAPTER IV

  “’Tis an old tale, and often told.”

  SIR WALTER SCOTT

That evening some people who were near them were talking about it, and that made Tom ask Clara if her friend was in the habit of doing startling things.

“Should you think so to look at her now?” queried Clara, looking across the room to where Miss Ercildoune stood.

“Indeed I shouldn’t,” Tom replied; and indeed no one would who saw her then.  “She’s as sweet as a sugar-plum,” he added, as he continued to look.  “What does she mean by getting off such rampant discourses?  She never wrote them herself,—­don’t tell me; at least somebody else put her up to it,—­that strong-minded-looking teacher over yonder, for instance. She looks capable of anything, and something worse, in the denouncing way; poor little beauty was her cat’s-paw this morning.”

“O Tom, how you talk!  She is nobody’s cat’s-paw.  I can tell you she does her own thinking and acting too.  If you’d just go and do something hateful, or impose on somebody,—­one of the waiters, for instance,—­you’d see her blaze up, fast enough.”

“Ah! philanthropic?”

Clara looked puzzled.  “I don’t know; we have some girls here who are all the time talking about benevolence, and charity, and the like, and they have a little sewing-circle to make up things to be sold for the church mission, or something,—­I don’t know just what; but Francesca won’t go near it.”

“Democratic, then, maybe.”

“No, she isn’t, not a bit.  She’s a thorough little aristocrat:  so exclusive she has nothing to say to the most of us.  I wonder she ever took me for a friend, though I do love her dearly.”

Tom looked down at his bright little sister, and thought the wonder was not a very great one, but didn’t say so; reserving his gallantries for somebody else’s sister.

“You seem greatly taken with her, Tom.”

“I own the soft impeachment.”

“Well, you’ll have a fair chance, for she’s coming home with me.  I wrote to mamma, and she says, bring her by all means,—­and Mr. Ercildoune gives his consent; so it is all settled.”