She paused. "Yes?" said Hugh, suggestively. "Some one you know?"
"Yes--and no! I have met her once. She is a Miss Wolfe, who has come to be a sort of companion to Mrs. Peyton. A singular-looking girl, with a most interesting face. I want to see her again; and yet,--somehow,--I am rather afraid of her."
"Not formidable, but--well, I don't know how to describe her. She impresses me as different from anybody I have ever seen. Wild is not the word; Rita was wild, but it was something totally different."
"Peggy is wild, too," said Hugh, "wild as a mountain goat, or was, before you took her in hand, Margaret. Is this young lady like Peggy?"
"Oh, not in the very least. She is not shy, not a bit; not shy, and yet not bold. She seems simply absolutely without self-consciousness; it is as if she said and did exactly what she felt like doing, with no thought as to whether it was--well, customary or not. I am afraid I am rather conventional, Cousin--I mean Hugh; not in thought, I hope, but--in temperament, perhaps. This girl strikes me very strangely; that is the only way I can describe her. Yet she attracted me strongly, the only time I saw her, which was the very day you came, by the way. I ought to have gone over to see her before this. I think I will go this evening, while you and Uncle John are having your after-supper smoke."
Margaret went over duly that evening, meaning to be very friendly to the strange young woman; but it happened to be one of Mrs. Peyton's bad times, and she sent down word that she needed Miss Wolfe, and could not possibly spare her. Margaret left a civil message, and went home disappointed, and yet the least bit relieved: she had rather dreaded a long tête-à-tête with her new neighbor.
"How absurd you are, Margaret Montfort," she said, severely, as she walked across the park. "Here you have been longing for a girl to talk to, and the moment one comes, you are seized with what Peggy calls 'the shyies,' just because she happens to be cut from a different pattern from your own."
Hugh was on the verandah, waiting for her, and seemed really disappointed when he heard that she had not seen Miss Wolfe; that showed how wide and cordial his interest was, and how much thought he took for others, Margaret told herself. What could he care about the meeting of a cousin he had just begun to know with a girl whom he never had seen?