Page:Shirley (1849 Volume 2).djvu/83

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
COMMUNICATIONS ON BUSINESS.
71

we might at a pinch bide behind some of the monuments: that tall erection of the Wynnes would screen us completely."

"Robert, what good spirits you have! Go—go!" added Caroline hastily, "I hear the front door——"

"I don't want to go; on the contrary, I want to stay."

"You know my uncle will be terribly angry: he forbade me to see you because you are a Jacobin."

"A queer Jacobin!"

"Go, Robert, he is coming; I hear him cough."

"Diable! It is strange—what a pertinacious wish I feel to stay!"

"You remember what he did to Fanny's——" began Caroline, and stopped abruptly short. Sweet-heart was the word that ought to have followed, but she could not utter it; it seemed calculated to suggest ideas she had no intention to suggest: ideas delusive and disturbing. Moore was less scrupulous; "Fanny's sweetheart?" he said at once. "He gave him a shower-bath under the pump—did he not? He'd do as much for me, I daresay, with pleasure. I should like to provoke the old Turk—not however against you: but he would make a distinction between a cousin and a lover, would he not?"

"Oh! he would not think of you in that way, of course not, his quarrel with you is entirely political; yet I should not like the breach to be widened, and he is so testy. Here he is at the garden-gate—for your own sake and mine, Robert, go!"