"I can't say, little fool; who ever knows why they like or dislike? I don't. The fault, I suppose, is mine, not yours. I never said it was yours. If you were ever so little wicked," she added, with a strange little laugh, "perhaps I could; but it is not worth talking about," and with a sudden change from this sinister levity to a seriousness which oscillated strangely between cruelty and sadness, she said--
"Beatrix, you like that young man, Mr. Strangways?" Again poor Beatrix blushed, and was about to falter an exculpation and a protest; but Lady Jane silenced it with a grave and resolute "_Yes--you like him_;" and after a little pause, she added--"Well, if you don't marry _him_, marry no one else;" and shortly after this, Lady Jane sighed heavily.
This speech of hers was delivered in a way that prevented evasion or girlish hypocrisy, and Beatrix had no answer but that blush which became her so; and dropping her eyes to the ground, she fell into a reverie, from which she was called up by Lady Jane, who said suddenly--
"What can that fat Monsieur Varbarriere be? He looks like Torquemada, the Inquisitor--mysterious, plausible, truculent--what do you think? Don't you fancy he could poison you in an ice or a cup of coffee; or put you into Cardinal Ballue's cage, and smile on you once a year through the bars?"
Beatrix smiled, and looked on the unctuous old gentleman with an indulgent eye, comparatively.
"I can't see him so melodramatically, Lady Jane," she laughed. "To me he seems a much more commonplace individual, a great deal less interesting and atrocious, and less like the abbot."
"What abbot?" said Lady Jane, sharply, "Now really that's very odd."
"I meant," said Beatrix, laughing, "the Abbot of Quedlinberg, in Canning's play, who is described, you know, as very corpulent and cruel."
"Oh, I forgot; I don't think I ever read it; but it chimed in so oddly with my dreams."
"How, what do you mean?" cried Beatrix, amused.
"I dreamed some one knocked at night at my door, and when I said 'come in,' that Monsieur Varbarriere put in his great face, with a hood on like a friar's, smiling like--like an assassin; and somehow I have felt a disgust of him ever since."
"Well, I really think he would look rather well in a friar's frock and hood," said Beatrix, glancing at the solemn old man again with a little laugh. "He would do very well for Mrs. Radcliff's one-handed monk, or Schedone, or some of those awful ecclesiastics that scare us in books."