"I am greatly touched by your confidence and I shall do everything I can think of to merit it," said the young man.
"Ah, mamma's confidence is wonderful!" Angela exclaimed.
"There was never anything like mamma's confidence. I am very different;
I have no confidence. And then I don't like being deposited, like a parcel, or being watched, like a curious animal. I am too fond of my liberty."
"That is the second time you have contradicted yourself," said Bernard.
"You said just now that you were not an independent being."
Angela turned toward him quickly, smiling and frowning at once.
"You do watch one, certainly! I see it has already begun."
Mrs. Vivian laid her hand upon her daughter's with a little murmur of tender deprecation, and the girl bent over and kissed her.
"Mamma will tell you it 's the effect of agitation," she said--"that I am nervous, and don't know what I say.
I am supposed to be agitated by Mr. Wright's departure; is n't that it, mamma?"
Mrs. Vivian turned away, with a certain soft severity.
"I don't know, my daughter. I don't understand you."
A charming pink flush had come into Angela's cheek and a noticeable light into her eye. She looked admirably handsome, and Bernard frankly gazed at her.
She met his gaze an instant, and then she went on.
"Mr. Longueville does n't understand me either. You must know that I am agitated," she continued. "Every now and then I have moments of talking nonsense. It 's the air of Baden, I think; it 's too exciting. It 's only lately I have been so. When you go away I shall be horribly ashamed."
"If the air of Baden has such an effect upon you," said Bernard, "it is only a proof the more that you need the solicitous attention of your friends."
"That may be; but, as I told you just now, I have no confidence--none whatever, in any one or anything. Therefore, for the present, I shall withdraw from the world--I shall seclude myself.
Let us go on being quiet, mamma. Three or four days of it have been so charming. Let the parcel lie till it 's called for.
It is much safer it should n't be touched at all. I shall assume that, metaphorically speaking, Mr. Wright, who, as you have intimated, is our earthly providence, has turned the key upon us. I am locked up.
I shall not go out, except upon the balcony!" And with this, Angela stepped out of the long window and went and stood beside Miss Evers.
Bernard was extremely amused, but he was also a good deal puzzled, and it came over him that it was not a wonder that poor Wright should not have found this young lady's disposition a perfectly decipherable page.
He remained in the room with Mrs. Vivian--he stood there looking at her with his agreeably mystified smile. She had turned away, but on perceiving that her daughter had gone outside she came toward Bernard again, with her habitual little air of eagerness mitigated by discretion.
There instantly rose before his mind the vision of that moment when he had stood face to face with this same apologetic mamma, after Angela had turned her back, on the grass-grown terrace at Siena.
To make the vision complete, Mrs. Vivian took it into her head to utter the same words.
"I am sure you think she is a strange girl."
Bernard recognized them, and he gave a light laugh.
"You told me that the first time you ever saw me--in that quiet little corner of an Italian town."
Mrs. Vivian gave a little faded, elderly blush.
"Don't speak of that," she murmured, glancing at the open window.
"It was a little accident of travel."
"I am dying to speak of it," said Bernard. "It was such a charming accident for me! Tell me this, at least--have you kept my sketch?"
Mrs. Vivian colored more deeply and glanced at the window again.
"No," she just whispered.
Bernard looked out of the window too. Angela was leaning against the railing of the balcony, in profile, just as she had stood while he painted her, against the polished parapet at Siena. The young man's eyes rested on her a moment, then, as he glanced back at her mother:
"Has she kept it?" he asked.
"I don't know," said Mrs. Vivian, with decision.
The decision was excessive--it expressed the poor lady's distress at having her veracity tested. "Dear little daughter of the Puritans--she can't tell a fib!" Bernard exclaimed to himself. And with this flattering conclusion he took leave of her.
