"I know I am going to like you. I can tell directly I can see a
person--can't I Arthur?" and, kissing her hand to Mrs. Meredith, Anna,
and the rector, too, she sprang into the carriage, and was whirled
rapidly away.
"Who is she?" Anna asked, and Mr. Leighton replied:
"She is an orphan niece of Colonel Hetherton's, and a great heiress, I
believe, though I never paid much attention to the absurd stories told
concerning her wealth."
"You met in Europe?" Mrs. Meredith said, and he replied:
"Yes, she has been quite an invalid, and has spent four years abroad,
where I accidentally met her. It was a very pleasant party, and I was
induced to join it, though I was with them in all not more than four
months."
He told this very rapidly, and an acute observer would have seen that
he did not care particularly to talk of Lucy Harcourt, with Anna for
an auditor. She was walking very demurely at his side, pondering in
her mind the circumstances which could have brought the rector and
Lucy Harcourt into such familiar relations as to warrant her calling
him Arthur and appear so delighted to see him.
"Can it be there was anything between them?" she thought, and her
heart began to harden against the innocent Lucy, at that very moment
chatting so pleasantly of her and of Arthur, too, replying to Mrs.
Hetherton, who suggested that Mr. Leighton would be more appropriate
for a clergyman.
"I shall say Arthur, for he told me I might that time we were in Rome.
I could not like him as well if I called him Mr. Leighton. Isn't he
splendid, though, in his gown, and wasn't his sermon grand?"
"What was the text?" asked Dr. Bellamy, mischievously, and, with a
toss of her golden curls and a merry twinkle of her eyes, Lucy
replied, "Simon, Simon, lovest thou me?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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