"He's stopped here—speaking to somebody—father, I believe; he's coming in—there! do you hear?" cried Cornelia, turning round with large eyes and her finger at her mouth, and speaking in a thrilling whisper. The sound of the quick, irregular tread of Mr. Bressant, following the professor into the study, was audible from below.
"Who can he be?" resumed she presently, as Sophie said nothing.
"If he's a gentleman, we don't need to know any more, do we?" replied her sister, from behind her sewing.
"Well, he is one," rejoined Cornelia, uncertain whether she was being made fun of or not. "He was dressed like one; not bandboxy, you know, but nicely and easily; and he stands and moves well; and then his face—"
"Is he handsome?" asked Sophie, as Cornelia paused.
"Oh! he has that refined look—I can't describe it—better than handsome," said she, giving a little wave with her hand to carry out her meaning.
"It's lucky he was so big," remarked Sophie, very innocently, "or you might not have been able to see so much of him in such a little time."
"Sophie!" said Cornelia, after a silence of some moments, speaking with tragic deliberation, "you're making fun of me; I think you're very unkind. I don't see what there is to laugh at in what I said; and if there was any thing, I think you might not laugh."
"O Neelie—dear Neelie!" exclaimed Sophie, coloring with regret and shame; "I didn't think you'd mind it; it was only my foolishness. Don't think I meant to be unkind to you, dear. I wish the man had never come here, whoever he is, if he is to come between us in any way. Won't you forgive me, darling?" and she held out her hand to Cornelia with a wistful, beseeching look in her eyes that thawed her sister's resentment immediately, and after a very brief struggle to preserve her dignity, she subsided with her face upon the pillow beside her sister's.
"We won't ever quarrel or any thing again, will we, Sophie?" said she, after a while.
"Never about that gentleman, at all events!" answered Sophie; and then they both laughed and kissed each other to seal the bargain.
Once, long afterward, Cornelia remembered that kiss, and the words that had accompanied it; and pondered over the bitter significance with which the simple act and playful agreement had become fraught.
But now, the subject was soon forgotten, and they fell to talking about the dresses once more; nor was the topic by any means exhausted when they were interrupted by the professor's voice calling to them from below.
CHAPTER IV.
A BUSINESS TRANSACTION.
Professor Valeyon led the way to the study, stood his cane in the corner, and placed a chair for his guest, in silence. "Just like his father!" said he to himself, as he repaired to the mantel-piece for his pipe; "not a bit of his mother about him. Who'd have thought so sickly a baby as they said he was, would have grown into such a giant?—Smoke?" he added, aloud.
"You must talk loud to me—I'm deaf," said the young man, with his hand to his ear.
"Pleasant thing in a pupil, that!" muttered the old gentleman, as he filled his pipe and lit it. "How it reminds one of his father—that bright questioning look, when he leans forward! One might know who he was by that and nothing else!" He sat down in his chair, and ruminated a moment.
"Hardly expected you up here so soon after your loss," observed he, in as kindly a tone and manner as was comportable with speaking in a very loud key.
"Loss! I've had no loss!" returned Bressant, with a look of perplexity. "Oh! you mean my father!" he exclaimed, suddenly, throwing his head back with a half-smile. He very seldom laughed aloud. "There was nothing to do. The funeral was the day before yesterday. I did all the business before then. Yesterday I packed up, and here I am!"
"Death couldn't have been unexpected, I presume?" said the professor, on whom Bressant's manner made an impression of resignation to his loss rather too complete.
"The hour of death can only be a matter of guess-work at any time," returned the young man. "My father had been expecting to die for some months past; but he'd been mistaken once or twice before, and I thought he might be this time. But he happened to guess right."
"Filial way of talking, that," thought Professor Valeyon, rather taken aback. "Didn't get that from his father; he was soft spoken enough, in all conscience! Queer now, this matter of resemblance! there's a certain something in his style of speaking, and in the way he looks just after he has spoken, that reminds me of Mrs. Margaret. Deaf people are all something alike, though; and he's been with her a great deal, I suppose. Well, well! as to the way he spoke about his father, what looked like indifference may have been merely embarrassment, or an attempt to disguise feeling; or perhaps it was but a deaf man's peculiarity. At all events, it can do no harm to suppose so."
"Were you with him during his last moments?" asked he.
"Oh, yes! I saw him die," answered Bressant, nodding, and pulling his close-cut brown beard.
Professor Valeyon smoked for a while in silence, occasionally casting puzzled and searching glances at the young man, who took up a book from the table—it happened to be a volume of Celestial Mechanics—and began to read it with great apparent interest. His face was an open and certainly not unpleasant one; very mobile, however, and vivid in its expressions; the eyebrows straight and delicate, and the eyes bright and powerful. The forehead was undeniably fine, prominently and capaciously developed. Nevertheless—and this was what puzzled the professor—there was a very evident lack of something in the face, in no way interfering with its intellectual aspect, but giving it, at times, an unnatural and even uncanny look. In meeting the young man's eyes, the old gentleman was ever and anon conscious of a disposition to recoil and shudder, and, at the same time, felt impelled, by what resembled a magnetic attraction, to gaze the harder. Did the very fact that some universal human characteristic was omitted from this person's nature endow him with an exceptional and peculiar power? There was an uncertainty, in talking and associating with him, as to what he would do or say; an ignorance of what might be his principles and points of view; an impossibility of supposing him governed by common laws. Such, at least, was the professor's fancy concerning him.
But again, turning his eyes to his pipe, or out of the window, was it not fancy altogether? Beyond that he was unusually tall and broad across the shoulders, and of a very intelligent cast of features, what was there or was there not in this young man different from any other? He had the muffled irregular voice, and alert yet unimpressible manner, peculiar to deafness. But was there any thing more? The professor took another look at him. He was reading, and certainly there were no signs of any thing strange in his appearance, more than that, at such a time, he should be reading at all. It was when speaking of his father that the uncanny expression had been especially noticeable. "Suppose," said Professor Valeyon to himself, "we try him on another subject."
"You've been educated at home, I understand," began he, from beneath his heavy eyebrows.
"Oh, yes!" replied Bressant, shutting his book on his knee, and returning the professor's look with one of exceeding keenness and comprehensiveness. "Educated to develop faculties of body and mind, not according to the ordinary school and college system." He drew himself up, with an air of such marvelous intellectual and physical efficiency, that it seemed to the professor as if each one of his five senses might equal the whole capacity of a common man. And then it occurred to him that he remembered, many years ago, having heard some one mention a theory of education which aimed rather to give the man power in whatever direction he chose to exercise it, than to store his mind with greater or less quantities of particular forms of knowledge. The only faculty to be left uncultivated,