The Argosy — page 367: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

338 The White Witch. selves there. She reproached Mary with having been a party to this. Mary denied it; she had known nothing of the movement ; but she did not deny that the surprise was welcome to her. Lady Davenant next strove to forbid Mary’s visits to Mrs. Lang. Mary refused to be forbidden. She was of an age then—nineteen—to select, in a degree, her own friends, and she should do so. Lady Davenant pointed out to her that the young man, Edward, was a ne’er-do-weel, with worse qualities she felt sure than appeared on the surface, and Mary ought not to subject herself to association with him. Mary laughed. She was in truth innocent of all affection for Edward Lang. He was clever and amusing, she said, and that was all, telling them laughable tales of his life in Australia. She had tolerated him for the sake of his mother, whose sweet and gentle manners made her home a Paradise after the unbending, carping coldness of Lady Davenant. ‘Thus the winter went on in Rome; Mary taking lessons, going into a little good society with her step-mother, and spending her spare time at Mrs. Lang’s. Mrs. Lang, insinuating and sweet, whispered praises of her son to Mary, mingled with veiled hints of his admiration and love for her. He was quite equal to playing the Romeo; while the mother told her she was as much persecuted as Juliet. Mary laughed, regarding it as a joke. It was the mother she was in love with, not the son: and alas, so much in love, so entirely under her dominion, that it would be a very difficult task to deny her anything. In her love and reverence for Mrs. Lang, the girl was blind. One thought was now insinuatingly presented to her: that if she consented to marry Edward, she would be free from her step-mother’s vexatious guardianship, and be able to spend openly as much time as she pleased with gentle Mrs. Lang. Most of her visits to Mrs. Lang were now paid by stealth, not an easy matter by any means, under the vigilant surveillance kept upon her by Lady Davenant, and the young lady was growing secretly rebellious. Affairs were in this stage: Edward believing he was making some way with Mary, and the time of carnival was fast approaching, when a young Englishman, travelling with his tutor, came upon the scene as arival. This was William Hunt, a lad of twenty, whose acquaint- ance young Lang had made in one of the gaming-houses to which he was himself a too constant visitor. Edward invited William Hunt to his mother’s one evening, for he had no objection to a quiet game of écarté, or what not, in private, with a pigeon who was worth plucking, and there the young man met Miss Davenant and fell desperately in love with her at first sight. After that time William Hunt was for ever framing an excuse for being at Mrs, Lang’s. But Mary, pretty enough to afford to be flinty-hearted, was no more moved by his boyish passion than she had been by the less disinterested vows of her other admirer, who had, moreover, the claims of being the one whom her step-mother condemned and Eon Gomicbooks