"
Mrs. Bell was not much minding them jointly. She was singling Lanfear
out for the expression of her pleasure in seeing him again, and
recalling the incidents of her summer at Magnolia before, it seemed, any
of her girls were out. She presented them collectively, and the eldest
of them charmingly reminded Lanfear that he had once had the magnanimity
to dance with her when she sat, in a little girl's forlorn despair of
being danced with, at one of those desolate hops of the good old Osprey
House.
"Yes; and now," her mother followed, "we can't wait a moment longer, if
we're to get our train for Monte Carlo, girls. We're not going to play,
doctor," she made time to explain, "but we are going to look on. Will
you tell your father, dear," she said, taking the girl's hands
caressingly in hers, and drawing her to her motherly bosom, "that we
found you, and did our best to find him? We can't wait now--our carriage
is champing the bit at the foot of the stairs--but we're coming back in
a week, and then we'll do our best to look you up again." She included
Lanfear in her good-bye, and all her girls said good-bye in the same
way, and with a whisking of skirts and twitter of voices they vanished
through the shrubbery, and faded into the general silence and general
sound like a bevy of birds which had swept near and passed by.
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