away into the
garden together. I remained with Mrs. Ambient; but as a servant had
brought out a couple of chairs I was not obliged to seat myself beside
her. Our conversation was not animated, and I, for my part, felt there
would be a kind of hypocrisy in my trying to make myself agreeable to
Mrs. Ambient I didn't dislike her--I rather admired her; but I was
aware that I differed from her inexpressibly. Then I suspected, what
I afterwards definitely knew and have already intimated, that the poor
lady had taken a dislike to me; and this of course was not encouraging.
She thought me an obtrusive and even depraved young man, whom a perverse
Providence had dropped upon their quiet lawn to flatter her husband's
worst tendencies. She did me the honor to say to Miss Ambient, who
repeated the speech, that she didn't know when she had seen her husband
take such a fancy to a visitor; and she measured, apparently, my evil
influence by Mark's appreciation of my society. I had a consciousness,
not yet acute, but quite sufficient, of all this; but I must say that
if it chilled my flow of small-talk, it did n't prevent me from thinking
that the beautiful mother and beautiful child, interlaced there against
their background of roses, made a picture such as I perhaps should not
soon see again. I was free, I supposed, to go into the house and write
letters, to sit in the drawing-room, to repair to my own apartment and
take a nap; but the only use I made of my freedom was to linger still in
my chair and say to myself that the light hand of Sir Joshua might have
painted Mark Ambient's wife and son. I found myself looking perpetually
at Dolcino, and Dolcino looked back at me, and that was enough to
detain me. When he looked at me he smiled, and I felt it was an absolute
impossibility to abandon a child who was smiling at one like that. His
eyes never wandered; they attached themselves to mine, as if among
all the small incipient things of his nature there was a desire to say
something to me. If I could have taken him upon my own knee, he perhaps
would have managed to say it; but it would have been far too delicate a
matter to ask his mother to give him up, and it has remained a constant
regret for me that on that Sunday afternoon I did not, even for a
moment, hold Dolcino in my arms. He had said that he felt remarkably
well, and that he was especially happy; but though he may have been
happy, with his charming head pillowed on his mother's b