Pilar looked forward with some
uneasiness to Wilhelm's first meeting with them, and he too felt far
from comfortable when Pilar brought a half-grown girl and a ten-year
old boy to him, and addressing herself to them said, "Embrace
Monsieur le Docteur, and look at him well. He is the best friend
your mother has on earth. You must love him very much, for he
deserves it."
The girl was fair like her mother. She was already dressed with
conspicuous elegance, and her manner betrayed extreme self-
consciousness. She glanced at Wilhelm with sly and wanton eyes, in
which it was easily to be read that she had a very good idea of the
real state of the case. She offered her forehead for his kiss,
bestowed a few cold and perfunctory caresses on her mother, and
slipped away to Anne, with whom she spent the whole afternoon in
eager whispered conversation, till the governess came to take her
back to the fashionable boarding school where she was being trained
to be a perfect great lady, and to make some enviable man happy in
the future by the bestowal of her hand.
The boy, who was accompanied by a priest, and was being educated at
a fashionable Jesuit institution, was of a better sort. He gave his
hand to Wilhelm shyly but heartily, while his innocent eyes looked
frankly and openly into his, and then hung over his mother with a
tenderness that had a touch of chivalry in it--half-funny, half-
affecting.
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