e sent to the inn," said Mrs. Melcombe, "to beg that he will come
on here to breakfast."

Laura had been gathering a bunch of violets, and she rushed up-stairs
and put them into her hair. Then in a great hurry she changed her
toilette, and, after ascertaining that the guest had arrived, she came
languidly into the breakfast-room, a straw-hat hanging by its strings
from her arm, and filled with primroses and other flowers. She felt as
she approached that all this looked quite romantic, but it did not look
so real and so unpremeditated as might have been wished.

Mrs. Melcombe had also changed her array. Little Peter, like most other
children, was always the picture of cleanly neatness when first he left
his nurse's hand in the morning, and his mother was much pleased at the
evident interest with which their guest regarded him, asking him various
questions about his lessons, his sports, and his pony. She had been
deeply gratified at the kind way in which all the Mortimers and their
connections had received her boy; none of them seemed at all jealous.
Even Valentine had never hinted or even looked at her as if he felt that
the property ought not to have gone to the younger branch.

Peter, now ten years old, and but a small boy for his age, had an
average degree of intelligence; and as he sat winking and blinking in
the morning sunshine, he constantly shook back a lock of hair that fell
over his forehead, till Brandon, quietly putting his hand to it, moved
it away, and while the boy related some childish adventure that he had
encouraged him to talk of, looked at him with scrutinizing and, as it
seemed to his mother, with almost anxious attention.

"Peter has been very poorly several times this winter," she remarked. "I
mean shortly to take him out for change of air."

"His forehead looks pale," said Brandon, withdrawing his hand, and for a
minute or two he seemed lost in thought, till Mrs. Melcombe, expressing
a hope that he would stay at her house as long as his affairs detained
him in that neighbourhood, he accepted her invitation with great
readiness. He would spend that day and the next with her, and, if she
would permit it, he would walk with young hopeful to his tutor's house,
and come back again in time for luncheon.

"I declare, he scarcely spoke to me all breakfast-time," thought Laura.
"I consider him decidedly a proud man, and any one might think he had
come to see Peter rather than to see us."

Brandon ev