The manners and conversation of Arthur Myrvin were such as to prepossess both Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton very much in his favour, and strengthened the opinion they had already formed concerning him, on the word of their son.  The respectful deference with which he ever treated Caroline and Emmeline often caused a laugh at his expense from Percy, but gratified Mrs. Hamilton; Percy declared he stood as much in awe of his sisters as if they were the highest ladies in the land.  Arthur bore his raillery with unruffled temper, but he felt the distance that fortune placed between him and those fair girls, and he hoped, by reserve, to lessen the danger that might in their society attack his peace.  Emmeline mistook this cautious reserve for coldness and distaste towards women, and, with the arts of a playful child, she frequently endeavoured to draw him from his abstraction, and render him a more agreeable companion.

There was still so very much of the child in Emmeline, though now rapidly approaching her eighteenth birthday, she was still so very young in manners and appearance, that the penetration of Mrs. Hamilton must not be too severely criticised, if it failed in discovering that intimately mingled with this childlike manner—­the warm enthusiasm of a kind nature—­was a fund of deep reflection, and feelings quite equal to her age.  Mrs. Hamilton fancied the realities of life were still to her a dream.  Had any one spoken to her of the marriage of Emmeline as soon taking place, she would have started at the idea, as a thing for some years impossible; and that her affections might become engaged—­that the childlike, innocent, joyous Emmeline, whose gayest pleasures still consisted in chasing with wild glee the butterflies as they sported on the summer flowers, or tying garlands of the fairest buds to adorn her own or her sister’s hair, or plucking the apples from the trees and throwing them to the village children as they sauntered at the orchard gate—­whose graver joys consisted in revelling in every poet that her mother permitted her to read, or making her harp resound with wild, sweet melody—­whose laugh was still so unchecked and gay—­that such a being could think of love, of that fervid and engrossing passion, which can turn the playful girl into a thinking woman, Mrs. Hamilton may be pardoned if she deemed it as yet a thing that could not be; and she, too, smiled at the playful mischief with which Emmeline would sometimes claim the attention of young Myrvin, engage him in conversation, and then, with good-humoured wit and repartee, disagree in all he said, and compel him to defend his opinions with all the eloquence he possessed.