Nora laughed till the tears came into her eyes; but Lady Caroline, whose seriousness precluded any admixture of humour in the situation, took the younger girl in her arms and kissed her, with a pitying tenderness and enthusiasm of consolation. "My little Nora! my little Nora!" she said. She was too much moved with the most genuine emotion and sympathy to say more; at which Nora, half accepting the crisis, half struggling against it, laughed again and again till the tears rolled over her cheeks.
"Lady Car! Lady Car! it is not for sorrow; it is the fun of it--the fun of it!" she cried.
But Carry did not see the fun. She wanted to soothe the sorrow away.
"Dearest Nora, this sort of disappointment is only visionary," she said. "It is your imagination that is concerned, not your heart. Oh, believe me, dear, you will laugh at it afterwards; you will think it nothing at all. How little he knows! I shall think less of his good sense, less of his discrimination, than I was disposed to do. To think of a man so left to himself as to throw my Nora away!"
"He has not thrown me away," cried Nora, with a little pride; "because, thank heaven, he never knew that he had me in his power! But you must think more, not less, of his discrimination, Carry; for if he never had any eyes for me, it was for the excellent good reason that he had seen Edith before. So my pride is saved--quite saved," the girl cried.
"Edith!" Carry repeated after her. And then her voice rose almost to a shriek--"Edith! You cannot mean that?"
"But I do mean it. Oh, I know there will be a thousand difficulties. Lord Lindores will never consent: that is why they go and do it, I suppose. Because she was the last person he ought to have fallen in love with, as they say in the 'Critic'----"
"Edith!" repeated Carry again. Nora was half satisfied, half disappointed, to find that her own part of the story faded altogether from her friend's mind when this astonishing peace of intelligence came in. Then she whispered in an awe-stricken voice, "Does my mother know?"
"Nobody knows--not even Edith herself. I saw it because, you know----And of course," cried Nora, in delightful self-contradiction, "it does not matter at all when I meet him now; for he is not thinking of me any longer, but of her. Oh, he never did think of me, except to say to himself, 'There is that horrid girl again!'"