Rose made little acquaintance with Eleanor that day. She, Rose, went
out to tea in the afternoon, and came back very cross: for she had not
once set eyes on her _fiancé_. The story was told to Eleanor Seymour;
who sympathized with her of course, having a lover of her own.
The next day was Sunday. The French girls were conducted at ten
o'clock to mass; the English would leave the house as usual for church
a quarter before eleven. Rose was dressed and waiting long before; her
impatience on Sunday mornings was great. Rose was in mourning, and a
source of secret chagrin that fact was, for she liked gay clothes
better than sombre ones.
"And so would you be worrying if you had some one waiting for you at
the church as I have," retorted Rose, in answer to a remark on her
restless impatience, which had been proffered to Miss Seymour by Emma
Mowbray.
"Waiting for you?" returned Eleanor, looking at Rose, but not
understanding.
"She means her lover, Miss Seymour," said Emma Mowbray.
"Yes, I do; and I don't care if I avow it," cried Rose, her face
glowing. "I know he loves me. He never takes his eyes off me in
church, and every glance speaks of love."
"He looks up at the other schools as much as he looks at ours," said
Emma Mowbray, who could rarely speak without a sneer. "Besides, he
only returns the glances you give him: love or no love, he would be a
sorry gallant not to do that."
"Last Thursday," cried Rose, unmindful of the reproof, "he smiled and
took off his hat to me as the school passed him in the street."
"But little Annette Duval said she saw you nod to him first!" said
Charlotte Singleton, the archdeacon's daughter.
"Annette Duval's a miserable little story-teller. I'll box her ears
when she comes in from mass. The fact is, Miss Seymour," added Rose,
turning to the stranger who had come amidst them, "the girls here are
all jealous of me, and Emma Mowbray doubly jealous. He is one of the
divinest fellows that ever walked upon the earth. You should see his
eyes and his auburn hair."
"With a tinge of red in it," put in Emma Mowbray.
"Well; you must point him out to me," said Eleanor, and then hastened
to change the conversation, for she had an instinctive dread of any
sort of quarrelling, and disliked ill-nature. Emma Mowbray had not
favourably impressed her: Rose had, in spite of her vanity and her
random avowals. "You are in mourning, Miss Darling?"
"Yes, for my eldest sister's husband, Mr. Carleton St. John. But I
have a new white bonnet, you see, though he has not been dead many
weeks: and I don't care whether mamma finds it out or not. I told the
milliner she need not specify in the bill whether the bonnet was white
or black. Oh dear! where is Mademoiselle Clarisse?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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