Reflected
from bygone associations, there had come a glimmer of something, not
gaiety, indeed, but like an appreciation of gaiety. The gloom and
inflexibility were gone, and there was an evident encouragement and
enjoyment of the incessant sallies of his bustling visitor.
How morbid must have been the tendencies of his habitual solitude, I think,
appeared from the evident thawing and brightening that accompanied even
this transient gleam of human society. I was not a companion--more childish
than most girls of my age, and trained in all his whimsical ways, never to
interrupt a silence, or force his thoughts by unexpected question or remark
out of their monotonous or painful channel.
I was as much surprised at the good-humour with which he submitted to
his cousin's saucy talk; and, indeed, just then those black-panelled and
pictured walls, and that quaint, misshapen room, seemed to have exchanged
their stern and awful character for something wonderfully pleasanter to me,
notwithstanding the unpleasantness of the personal criticism to which the
plain-spoken lady chose to subject me.
Just at that moment Captain Oakley joined us.
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