“Come, you’re not my father confessor.
I’m not to tell you all. If I told you
that, you’d make another portrait.”
“I’m sure I couldn’t draw a disparaging
picture of anybody you would really call your friend.
But indeed I pity you, living among so many such people.
There can be nobody here who understands you.”
“Oh, I’m not very unintelligible.”
“Much more so than Miss O’Joscelyn.
I shouldn’t wish to have to draw your portrait.”
“Pray don’t; if it were frightful I should
think you uncivil; and if you made it handsome, I
should know you were flattering. Besides, you
don’t know enough of me to tell me my character.”
“I think I do; but I’ll study it a little
more before I put it on the canvass. Some likenesses
are very hard to catch.”
Fanny felt, when she went to bed, that she had spent
a pleasanter evening than she usually did, and that
it was a much less nuisance to talk to her cousin
Adolphus than to either his father, mother, or sister;
and as she sat before her fire, while her maid was
brushing her hair, she began to think that she had
mistaken his character, and that he couldn’t
be the hard, sensual, selfish man for which she had
taken him. Her ideas naturally fell back to Frank
and her love, her difficulties and sorrows; and, before
she went to sleep, she had almost taught herself to
think that she might make Lord Kilcullen the means
of bringing Lord Ballindine back to Grey Abbey.
She had, to be sure, been told that her cousin had
spoken ill of Frank; that it was he who had been foremost
in decrying Lord Ballindine’s folly and extravagance;
but she had never heard him do so; she had only heard
of it through Lord Cashel; and she quite ceased to
believe anything her guardian might say respecting
her discarded lover. At any rate she would try.
Some step she was determined to take about Lord Ballindine;
and, if her cousin refused to act like a cousin and
a friend, she would only be exactly where she was
before.
The next three days passed slowly and tediously for
most of the guests assembled at Grey Abbey. Captain
Cokely, and a Mr Battersby, came over from Newbridge
barracks, but they did not add much to the general
enjoyment of the party, though their arrival was hailed
with delight by some of the young ladies. At
any rate they made the rooms look less forlorn in
the evenings, and made it worth the girls’ while
to put on their best bibs and tuckers.
“But what’s the use of it at all?”
said Matilda Fitzgerald to little Letty O’Joscelyn,
when she had spent three-quarters of an hour in adjusting
her curls, and setting her flounces properly, on the
evening before the arrival of the two cavalry officers;
“not a soul to look at us but a crusty old colonel,
a musty old bishop, and a fusty old beau!”
“Who’s the old beau?” said Letty.
