“I have sent to the inn,” said Mrs. Melcombe, “to beg that he will come on here to breakfast.”

Laura had been gathering a bunch of violets, and she rushed up-stairs and put them into her hair.  Then in a great hurry she changed her toilette, and, after ascertaining that the guest had arrived, she came languidly into the breakfast-room, a straw-hat hanging by its strings from her arm, and filled with primroses and other flowers.  She felt as she approached that all this looked quite romantic, but it did not look so real and so unpremeditated as might have been wished.

Mrs. Melcombe had also changed her array.  Little Peter, like most other children, was always the picture of cleanly neatness when first he left his nurse’s hand in the morning, and his mother was much pleased at the evident interest with which their guest regarded him, asking him various questions about his lessons, his sports, and his pony.  She had been deeply gratified at the kind way in which all the Mortimers and their connections had received her boy; none of them seemed at all jealous.  Even Valentine had never hinted or even looked at her as if he felt that the property ought not to have gone to the younger branch.

Peter, now ten years old, and but a small boy for his age, had an average degree of intelligence; and as he sat winking and blinking in the morning sunshine, he constantly shook back a lock of hair that fell over his forehead, till Brandon, quietly putting his hand to it, moved it away, and while the boy related some childish adventure that he had encouraged him to talk of, looked at him with scrutinizing and, as it seemed to his mother, with almost anxious attention.

“Peter has been very poorly several times this winter,” she remarked.  “I mean shortly to take him out for change of air.”

“His forehead looks pale,” said Brandon, withdrawing his hand, and for a minute or two he seemed lost in thought, till Mrs. Melcombe, expressing a hope that he would stay at her house as long as his affairs detained him in that neighbourhood, he accepted her invitation with great readiness.  He would spend that day and the next with her, and, if she would permit it, he would walk with young hopeful to his tutor’s house, and come back again in time for luncheon.

“I declare, he scarcely spoke to me all breakfast-time,” thought Laura.  “I consider him decidedly a proud man, and any one might think he had come to see Peter rather than to see us.”

Brandon evidently did wish to walk with the boy, and accordingly rose as soon as he had finished his breakfast, Mrs. Melcombe giving him some directions, and a key to let himself in with by a side gate.

All the intelligence Brandon possessed, and all his keenness of observation, he exercised during his walk with the little heir.  He could generally attract children, and Peter was already well inclined toward him, for he had shown himself to be knowing about a country boy’s pleasures; also he knew all about the little Mortimers and their doings.