Willy?" said another voice, as a tall thin personage stepped out from the hall, and looked poor Waife unconsciously in the face.
"Alban Morley!" faltered Waife; you are but little changed!"
The Colonel looked again, and in the elderly, lame, one-eyed, sober-looking man, recognized the wild, jovial Willy, who had tamed the most unruly fillies, taken the most frantic leaps, caroled forth the blithest song—madcap, good fellow, frolicsome, childlike darling of gay and grave, young and old!
"'Eheu, fugaces, Postume, Postume,
Labuntur anni,'"
said the Colonel, insensibly imbibing one of those Horatian particles that were ever floating in that classic atmosphere—to Darrell medicinal, to Fairthorn morbific. "Years slide away, Willy, mutely as birds skim through air; but when friend meets with friend after absence, each sees the print of their crow's-feet on the face of the other. But we are not too old yet, Willy, for many a meet—at the fireside! Nothing else in our studs, we can still mount our hobbies; and thorough-bred hobbies contrive to be in at the death. But you are waiting to learn by what tide and name this stranger lays claim to so peerless a niece. Know then—Ah, here comes Darrell, Guy Darrell, in this young lady you will welcome the grandchild of Sidney Branthwaite, our old Eton school friend, a gentleman of as good blood as any in the land!"
"None better," cried Fairthorn, who has sidled himself into the group; "there's a note on the Branthwaite genealogy, Sir, in your father's great work upon Monumental Brasses.'"
"Permit me to conclude, Mr. Fairthorn," resumed the Colonel; "Monumental Brasses are painful subjects. Yes Darrell, yes Lionel; this fair creature, whom Lady Montfort might well desire to adopt, is the daughter of Arthur Branthwaite, by marriage with the sister of Frank Vance, whom I shrewdly suspect nations will prize, and whose works princes will hoard, when many a long genealogy, all blazoned in azure and or, will have left not a scrap for the moths."
"Ah!" murmured Lionel, "was it not I, Sophy, who taught you to love your father's genius! Do you not remember how, as we bent over his volume, it seemed to translate to us our own feelings?—to draw us nearer together? He was speaking to us from his grave."
Sophy made no answer; her face was hidden on the breast of the old man, to whom she still clung closer and closer.
