Rosalind took the hint, and with more tact than is usually found in the possession of seventeen and a half, she said to Lady Harrington,
"If I promise to keep my hands not only from picking and stealing, but from touching, will your ladyship indulge me with a sight of your press, and your boxes, and a volume or two of your _hortus siccus_? for I feel considerable aspirations after the glory of becoming a botanist myself."
"My ladyship will show you something infinitely more to the purpose, then, if you will come to the hothouse with me," replied Lady Harrington, rising, and giving an intelligible glance to her son as she did so, which immediately caused him to rise and follow her. "I cannot take you where I should be sure to overhear them, my dear," she added in a whisper as she led Rosalind from the room; "for if my rough diamond should chance to be too rough with her, I should infallibly burst out upon them; and yet I know well enough that I should do nothing but mischief."
Helen was thus left alone with the kind-hearted but pertinacious baronet. He seemed to have a misgiving of the attack that was about to be opened upon him; for he made a fidgetty movement in his chair, pushed it back, and looked so very much inclined to run away, that Helen saw no time was to be lost, and, in a voice not over-steady, said,
"I want to speak to you, Sir Gilbert, about my dear mamma. I fear from what you said to Charles, and more still by nobody's coming from Oakley to see us, that you are angry with her.--If it is about the will, Sir Gilbert, you do her great injustice: I am very, very sure that she neither wished for such a will, nor knew any thing about it."
"It is very pretty and dutiful in you, Miss Helen, to say so, and to think so too if you can. Perhaps I might have done the same at nineteen; but at sixty-five, child, one begins to know a little better what signs and tokens mean.--There is no effect without a cause, Miss Helen. The effect in this affair is already pretty visible to all eyes, and will speedily become more so, you may depend upon it. The cause may be still hid from babes and sucklings, but not from an old fellow like me, who knew your poor father, girl, before you were hatched or thought of,--and knew him to be both a good and a wise man, who would never have done the deed he did unless under the influence of one as ever near and ever dear to him as your mother."