d when the song is over her head is
lying on his breast.

While they are still sitting in silence there is a ring at the door, and
Lawrence Newt and Amy Waring enter the room.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

BORN TO BE A BACHELOR.

"The truth is, Madame," began Lawrence Newt, addressing Mrs. Bennet,
"that I am ashamed of myself--I ought to have called a hundred times.
I ask your pardon, Sir," he continued, turning to Mr. Bennet, who was
standing irresolutely by the sofa, half-leaning upon the arm.

"Oh!--ah! I am sure," replied Mr. Bennet, with the nervous smile flitting
across his face and apparently breaking out all over him; and there he
remained speechless and bowing, while Mr. Newt hastened to seat himself,
that every body else might sit down also.

Mrs. Bennet said that she was really, glad to see the face of an old
friend again whom she had not seen for so long.

"But I see you every day in Gabriel, my dear Madame," replied Lawrence
Newt, with quaint dignity. Mother and son both smiled, and the father
bowed as if the remark had been addressed to him.

Amy seated herself by Gabriel and Ellen, and talked very animatedly with
them, while the parents and Mr. Newt sat together. She praised the roses,
and smelled them very often; and whenever she did so, her eyes, having
nothing in particular to do at the moment, escaped, as it were, under her
brows through the petals of the roses as she bent over them, and wandered
away to Lawrence Newt, whose kind, inscrutable eyes, by the most
extraordinary chance in the world, seemed to be expecting hers, and were
ready to receive them with the warmest welcome, and a half-twinkle--or
was it no twinkle at all? which seemed to say, "Oh! you came--did you?"
And every time his eyes seemed to say this Amy burst out into fresh
praises of those beautiful roses to her younger cousins, and pressed them
close to her cheek, as if she found their moist, creamy coolness
peculiarly delicious and refreshing--pressed them so close, indeed, that
she seemed to squeeze some of their color into her cheeks, which Gabriel
and Ellen both thought, and afterward declared to their mother, to be
quite as beautiful as roses.

Amy's conversation with her young cousins was very lively indeed, but it
had not a continuous interest. There were incessant little pauses, during
which the eyes slipped away again across the room, and fell as softly as
before, plump into the same welcome and the same little interrog