ing, that there had been no secrets between them during all the
happy life that was past.

How entirely relieved Elinor was when he started to join his friends
next morning it would be impossible to put into words. She watched all
his lingering movements before he went with eyes in which she tried to
quench the impatience, and look only with the fond admiration and
interest she felt upon all his little preparations, his dawning sense of
what was becoming in apparel, the flower in his coat, the carefully
rolled umbrella, the hat brushed to the most exquisite smoothness, the
handkerchief just peeping from his breast-pocket. It is always a
revelation to a woman to find that these details occupy as much of a
young man's attention as her own toilette occupies hers; and that he is
as tremulously alive to "what is worn" in many small particulars that
never catch her eye, as she is to details which entirely escape him. She
smiles at him as he does at her, each in that conscious superiority to
the other, which is on the whole an indulgent sentiment. Underneath all
her anxiety to see him go, to get rid of him (was that the dreadful
truth in this terrible crisis of her affairs?), she felt the amusement
of the boy's little coquetries, and the mother's admiration of his fresh
looks, his youthful brightness, his air of distinction; how different
from the Rector's boy, who was a nice fellow enough, and a credit to his
rectory, and whose mother, I do not doubt, felt in his ruddy good looks
something much superior in robustness, and strength, and manhood to the
too-tall and too-slight golden youth of the ladies at Lakeside! It even
flitted across Elinor's mind to give him within herself the title that
was to be his, everybody said--Lord Lomond! And then she asked herself
indignantly what honour it could add to her spotless boy to have such a
vain distinction; a name that had been soiled by so much ignoble use?
Elinor had prided herself all her life on an indifference to, almost a
contempt for, the distinctions of rank: and that it should occur to her
to think of that title as an embellishment to Pippo--nay, to think
furtively, without her own knowledge, so to speak, that Pippo looked
every inch a lord and heir to a peerage, was an involuntary weakness
almost incredible. She blushed for herself as she realised it:--a
peerage which had meant so little that was excellent--a name connected
with so many undesirable precedents: still I suppose