CHAPTER VII. – STIRRING UP OF STRIFE.
It must be owned, that after an interview of the kind, the position of any young man in Venables's place would have been somewhat distressing. He prided himself on his savoir vivre: he could carry off a sense of awkwardness as well as most people; and his cousin's innocent unconsciousness helped him. Yet his manner towards her had changed, and he knew it; and he was in perpetual terror that she might ask for an explanation. Alone with her, he was comparatively at his ease; but he was embarrassed – very unnecessarily – when her father's eye was upon them. Where Moray trusted, he trusted implicitly: if he had not trusted his nephew, he would never have spoken as he had spoken; and although, doubtless, he may have meditated over the matter a good deal, it was not with reference to anything passing before him. And Jack might perhaps have felt more at his ease in one respect, had he known that Leslie occupied his uncle's thoughts nearly as much as himself. But it was in his sanguine nature to jump to conclusions; and when certain trifling preliminary obstacles should have been smoothed away, including the choice of a profession and lucrative success in it, he pictured a happy couple launched on a pleasant wedding-trip, with wind and tide and everything in their favour.
Yet, characteristically enough, it was not only the thought, "Were Grace to catechise me, what in the world should I answer?" that gave him a vast deal of needless anxiety. Musing over a possible engagement, and the minor questions that would arise out of it, the speculations of the ridiculous young man ran somewhat in this wise –
"I suppose if I were to marry the heiress of Glenconan, my uncle would insist on my taking the family name. Well, there need be no objection to that. Venables-Moray would sound well enough, and I might even make such a sacrifice to love as to sink my patronymic, and style myself Moray alone. But then he might wish us to spend the best part of the year in Glenconan; and Grace is already falling passionately in love with the place. I like it myself, but I don't like the climate. Scotland, except in the picturesqueness of the Highlands, is only a colder and a bleaker England; and England, for that matter, is bleak enough. After all, however, climate and scenery are secondary points; and Grace, if she were persuaded to love me, is just the sort of girl to be amenable. It would be a case of 'my people shall be thy people,' &c., – not that I would ask her to make unreasonable sacrifices. And then my profession, whatever it may be, would be reason sufficient for our living elsewhere. Glenconan would never give me Grace if he thought I meant to live upon her money."
Then waking out of his Alnaschar-like dreams, he might glance across at Leslie half guiltily, and think how that sensible individual would laugh at him did he guess at all that was passing in his mind. And perhaps, on the whole, it had hitherto been as well for Leslie that he was profoundly ignorant of what was going on.
Then, being diverted from one train of thought, Jack's lively brain would take another turn, and towards a point that perhaps ought to have been settled in the first place. He would ask himself how far he was really in love, and
