‘AY FLETH THE TIME, IT WOL NO MAN ABIDE.’
Nearly six months had gone since that wintry parting, when the lovers
clasped hands and blessed each other under the sign of Aries; and now
it was midsummer, and all the fields were green, and the limes were
breaking into blossom, and the hawthorn-flower was dead, and the last
of the blue-bells had faded, and all the white orchard-blooms, the
tender loveliness of spring, belonged to the past; for the beauty of
earth and nature is a thing of perpetual change, so closely allied with
death that in every rapture there is the beginning of a regret.
Gerald Goring had returned, not quite so soon as he had promised beside
the winter hearth, but in time to offer birthday greetings to Lina,
and to assist in those legal preparations and argumentations which
preceded the marriage settlement; in this case a formidable document,
involving large interests, and full of consideration for children and
grandchildren yet unborn; for daughters dying unmarried, or requiring
to be dowered for marriage; for sons who might have to make marriage
settlements of their own. There was to be a complete family history,
put hypothetically, in Miss Lawford’s marriage settlement.
Vainly had Lina tried to dower her sister with half, or at least some
portion of her own wealth. Daphne obstinately refused to accept any
such boon; and Edgar as obstinately sustained her in her determination.
‘I won’t accept a penny,’ said she.
‘I don’t want a halfpenny with her,’ said he; a refusal which
Mrs. Turchill considered supreme folly on the part of son and
daughter-in-law; for what improvements might have been made at
Hawksyard with a few spare thousands, whereas her son’s income, though
ample for all the needs and comforts of this life, left no margin for
building.
‘Why should not Daphne have a range of hot-houses like those Mr. Goring
has built for her sister?’ argued Mrs. Turchill. ‘Or why should not you
rebuild the stables, which are dreadfully old-fashioned?’
‘I would not change the dear old fashion for worlds, mother, now that
I have made every sanitary improvement,’ answered Edgar; ‘least of all
would I improve Hawksyard into a modern house with Goring’s money.’
‘But it is not Mr. Goring’s money that is offered; it is Miss
Lawford’s.’
‘That is the same thing. The loss would be his. Don’t talk any more
about it, mother; Daphne and I have made up our minds.’
This was decisive; for Mrs. Turchill knew that Daphne’s word was
Edgar’s law. She was reconciled to the idea of the marriage, but in
her confidences with Deborah, she could not help talking of her son’s
attachment as an infatuation.
Gerald had come back considerably improved in health and spirits by
his Canadian and Hudson’s Bay adventures. He had crossed the Turtle
Mountain, and the arid plains beyond, and from the crest of one of the
Sweet Grass Hills had seen the rugged and snowy outline of the Rockies,
standing out in full relief against the western sky-line. He had shot a
bear or two, and had some experience of wolves. He had eaten pemmican,
and ridden a woolly horse; he had slept at a Hudson’s Bay station, and
had passed a night or two, half-frozen and wholly awake, under canvas.
Variety and adventure had done him good physically and mentally; and he
told himself that of that fever which had tormented him when he left
England—a fever of foolish longings and fond regrets, idle thoughts
of things that might have been—he was cured wholly. Yet who shall say
whether time might not show some resemblance between this cure and that
of a dangerous lunatic, who is discharged from Bedlam a sane man, and
who cuts his mother’s head off with a carving-knife a fortnight after
his release?
The double wedding was to take place in October. Nothing could induce
Sir Vernon to consent to an earlier date.
‘I shall lose my darling soon enough,’ he said, ignoring Daphne in his
calculations of loss. ‘Let me keep her till the end of the summer. Let
us spend this one summer together. Who knows that it may not be my
last?’
Any wish expressed by her father would have governed Madoline’s
conduct, and this wish, expressed so stringently, could not be
disregarded. Sir Vernon was frequently ailing, in a languid
half-hearted way, which looked like hypochondriasis, but might be
actual disease, and a part of that organic evil which was never
clearly described. His doctor recommended an entire change of
scene—Switzerland, the Engadine, if he could make up his mind to travel
so far, and to be satisfied with the simpler diet and accommodation
of that skyey world. There was a good deal of discussion, and it was
ultimately settled that Sir Vernon and his daughters should start for
Switzerland at the end of June, and move quietly about there, studying
the invalid’s pleasure in all things. Sir Vernon set his face against
the Engadine, preferring the more civilised shores of Lake Leman, which
he knew by heart.
Daphne had never been beyond Fontainebleau, and was enraptured at the
idea of seeing snow-clad mountains and strange people. Gerald and Edgar
were to be of the party, and they were only to return to England in
time for the double wedding. The sisters were to be married on the same
day, after all. That had been settled for them arbitrarily by family
and friends, despite Daphne’s objection; and Warwickshire people were
already beginning to speculate upon the details of the ceremony, and
to wonder what dean or bishop would be privileged to tie the knot,
assisted by the Rev. Marmaduke Ferrers.
Daphne’s conduct since her engagement had been unobjectionable. Nobody
could deny her sweetness, or could fail to approve the sobriety which
had come over her manners and conversation. Her hot fits and cold fits,
her high spirits and low spirits, were all over. She was uniformly
amiable and uniformly grave—not taking rapturous pleasure in anything,
but seemingly contented with her lot in life, devoted in her affection
to her sister, unvaryingly kind to her lover. Edgar was never tired of
thanking heaven for the blessedness of his lot. He had remitted his
tenants five-and-twenty per cent. of their March rents; not that there
was any special need for such indulgence, but because he longed to be
generous to somebody, and to disseminate his overflowing joy.
‘I shall do the same for you next October, in honour of my marriage,’
he said in his speech at the audit dinner; ‘and after that I shall want
all the money you can pay me, as a family man.’
Madoline, utterly happy in her lover’s society, after that interval of
severance which had seemed so long and dreary, cared very little where
their lives were to be spent, so long as they were to be together. Yet
the idea of revisiting Lake Leman—which she had seen and loved seven
years ago in a quiet pilgrimage with her father—with Gerald for her
attendant and companion, had a certain fascination.
‘It is rather like anticipating our honeymoon, is it not, dear?’ he
asked laughingly. ‘But when the honeymoon comes we shall find some new
world to explore.’
‘Would you like to take me to the Red River?’
‘I think that would be a shade too rough, even for your endurance.
The Italian lakes, and a winter in Rome, would suit us better. It is
all very well for a man to travel in a district where he has to cover
his face with a muffler, and head the driving snow, till he is nearly
suffocated with his frozen breath, and has to get himself thawed
carefully at the first camp-fire; but that kind of experience lasts
a long time, and it is pleasing to fall back upon the old habit of
luxurious travelling, and to ride in a _coupé_ through Mont Cenis or
St. Gotthard, and to arrive at one’s destination without any large risk
of being swallowed whole in a swamp, or burned alive in a prairie fire.’
‘I shall delight in seeing Rome with you,’ Madoline answered gently.
‘I thought you would like it. I really know my Rome. It is a subject I
have studied thoroughly, and I shall love playing cicerone for you.’
It was midsummer, a perfect midsummer evening, the placid sky still
faintly tinted with rose and amethyst yonder where the sun had just
gone down behind the undulating line of willows. The little town of
Stratford lay in its valley, folded in a purple cloud, only the slender
church spire rising clear and sharp against that tranquil evening sky.
Daphne had stolen away from Madoline and Gerald, who were sitting on
the terrace, while Edgar, chained to his post in the dining-room by
a lengthy monologue upon certain political difficulties, with which
Sir Vernon was pleased to favour him, vainly longed for liberty to
rejoin his idol. She had put on her hat, and had set out upon a lonely
pilgrimage to Stratford. They were all to leave South Hill early
to-morrow, and it was Daphne’s fancy to bid good-bye to the church
which sheltered those ashes it were the worst of sacrilege to disturb.
It was an idle fancy, no doubt, engendered of a mind prone to idle
thoughts; but Daphne, having no urgent occupation for her time this
evening, fancied she had a right to indulge it.
‘I am going for a little walk,’ she had told Edgar, as she left the
dining-room; ‘don’t fidget yourself about me.’
From which moment poor Edgar had been in agonies of restlessness,
turning an ear deafer than any adder’s to Sir Vernon’s disquisition
upon the critical state of the country, and the utter incapacity of the
men in office to deal with such a crisis, and inwardly chafing against
every extension of the subject which prolonged the seemingly endless
discourse.
‘A little walk!’ and why, and where, and with whom? Vainly did Edgar’s
strained gaze explore the distant landscape. From his position at the
dinner-table, he could see a fine range of country ten or fifteen miles
away; but never a glimpse of terrace or garden by which Daphne must go.
And it was the rule of his life to show Sir Vernon the extremity of
respect, an almost old-fashioned and Grandisonian reverence. Therefore
to cut short that prosy discourse was impossible.
The blessed moment of release came at last. Sir Vernon finished his
claret with a sigh, and left nation and ministry to their fate. Edgar
hurried to the terrace. Gerald and Madoline were sipping their coffee
at a little rustic bamboo table, the Maltese Fluff lying luxuriously in
his mistress’s silken lap.
‘Have you any idea where Daphne has gone?’ Edgar asked despairingly.
‘No, indeed. I saw her stroll down towards the river. Perhaps she has
gone to see her aunt.’
‘Thanks, yes, I daresay,’ replied Edgar, speeding off towards the
Rectory without waiting to consider whether the clue were worth
following.
While Mr. Turchill was hastening across the fields at a racing pace,
Daphne was seated in her boat, quietly drifting towards Stratford,
along a dreamy twilit river, where every willow had a ghostly look in
the evening dimness.
She was full of grave thoughts on this her last night in Warwickshire.
It was more than a year—a year and a quarter—since she had come home
for good, as the phrase goes, and a year and a quarter makes a large
section of a young life. The years are so long in early youth, when the
heart and mind live so fast, and every day is a history: so strangely
different from the monotonous years of middle age, which glide past
unawares, like the level flats seen from a canal-boat, each meadow so
like the last that the voyager is unconscious of progress, till he
feels the salt breath of Death’s ocean creeping across the low marshes
of declining life, and knows that his journey is nearly done.
To Daphne that year at South Hill had been a lifetime. How ardently she
had felt and thought and suffered within the time; what resolutions
made and broken; what fevers of dangerous delight, and dull intervals
of remorse; what wild wicked hopes; what black despair! Looking back
at the time that was gone and dead, she was inclined to exaggerate its
joys, to gloss over its pain.
‘At the worst I have been happy with him,’ she said, remembering how
much of that vanished time had been spent in Gerald Goring’s society,
‘though he is nothing to me, and never can be anything to me but a man
to be shunned; yet we have been happy together, and that is something.’
She remembered some lines of Dryden’s which Gerald had quoted in her
presence:
‘To-morrow do thy worst, for I have lived to-day.
Be fair, or foul, or rain, or shine,
The joys I have possessed, in spite of Fate, are mine.’
She had lived her day. There had been moments in the past; moments
that had stirred the deeps of her soul with a power as mysterious as
the sweep of the angelic wing on Bethesda’s pool; moments when she had
fancied herself beloved by him, whom to love was treason. These stood
out upon the page of memory in fiery characters, and in their supernal
light all the rest of the record seemed dull and dark. There had been
hours of unquestioning bliss when she had in no wise reasoned upon
her happiness, when she had not asked herself whether she was loved
or scorned, but had been happy as the summer insects are among the
flowers, vivified by the sunshine, asking nothing but to live and enjoy
that glorious warmth and brightness. So at times she had abandoned
herself to the delight of his society, whom she had loved from the hour
of their first meeting, giving all her heart and mind to him at once,
as utterly as Juliet gave hers to Romeo.
She had lived her day. The long vista of to-morrow and to-morrow opened
before her joyless gaze, and she could look down the tranquil path it
was her fate to tread, a wife beloved and honoured, a sister fondly
loved, a daughter reconciled with her father, mistress of a fine old
house, full of quaint and pleasant associations, established for life
in the heart of rural scenes which her soul loved. Surely it was not a
destiny to be contemplated with such profound sadness as shadowed her
face to-night, while she leant listlessly on her oars and drifted down
the full dark river.
All was very quiet below the bridge when she landed at the
boat-builder’s yard, and left her craft in charge of that amphibious
and more than half-intoxicated hanger-on who is generally to be found
waiting on fortune at every landing-stage. The walk to the church was
dark and shadowy; lights twinkling in the low cottage windows; glimpses
of home-life dimly seen through open doors. Daphne walked quickly to
the avenue of limes, that green odorous aisle that leads to the porch.
There had been evening service, and the lights were still burning
here and there, and the heavy old door stood ajar. Daphne pushed it
gently open, and crept into the church, past the stately monuments of
mediæval Cloptons, whose marble effigies reposed in solemn pomp upon
sculptured tombs, rich in armorial emblazonment. In the faint light and
mysterious shadow the stony figures looked like real sleepers, waiting
for the last dread summons. Daphne stole past them with noiseless
footfall, and crept along the aisle to the lovely old chancel, where,
just within the altar-rails, William Shakespeare takes his last earthly
rest. The sexton came out of the vestry to see whose footfall it was
that fell so lightly on that everlasting flint. Daphne was standing by
the altar-rail in a reverie, looking up at the calm sculptured face,
so serene in its contentment with a life which, in the vast range and
dominion of a mind that was in itself a kingdom, had held all things
worth having. These are the full and rounded lives, complete and
perfect in themselves, the calm and placid lives of contemplative men,
for whom the gates of the spiritual universe stand ever open, who are
in no wise dependent upon the joys, and gains, and triumphs of this
work-a-day world.
‘Were you always happy, my calm-faced Shakespeare?’ wondered Daphne.
‘Could you have sounded all the deeps of sorrow without having yourself
suffered? I think not. Yet there seems hardly any room in your life for
great sorrow, except perhaps in the loss of that child who died young.
Was Ann Hathaway your only love, I wonder—you who wrote so sweetly of
sorrowful hopeless love—or was there another, another whom we know as
Juliet, and Imogen, and Cordelia: another from whom you always lived
far apart, yet whom you always loved?’
‘I beg your pardon, miss,’ said the sexton; ‘I’m going to lock up the
church.’
‘Let me stay a few minutes longer,’ pleaded Daphne, taking out her
purse. ‘I am going away from England to-morrow, and I have come to say
good-bye to the dear old church.’
‘Are you going to be away long, miss?’
‘Nearly three months.’
‘That’s a very short time,’ said the old man, pocketing Daphne’s
half-crown. ‘I thought perhaps you were going away for many years—going
to settle somewhere across the sea. It hardly seems like saying
good-bye to the church if you are to be back among us this side
Michaelmas.’
‘No,’ said Daphne dreamily, looking along the shadowy nave, where
broken rays of moonlight from the painted windows shone upon the dark
oak benches like dropped jewels. ‘It is not long; but one never knows.
To-night I feel as if it were going to be for ever. I am so fond of
this old church.’
‘No wonder, miss. It’s a beautiful church. You should hear the
Americans admire it. I suppose they’ve nothing half as good in their
country.’
The moon was up when Daphne left the church, and walked round by
head-stones and memorial-crosses to the shaded path beside the river,
where here and there a seat on the low wall invited the weary to repose
in the cool shade of ancient elms. The broad full river looked calm and
bright under the moonlit sky; the murmur of the weir sounded like a
lullaby.
Daphne walked slowly to the end of the path, and stood for a long time
looking down at the river. She felt curiously loth to leave the spot.
Yet it was time she were on her homeward way. They would miss her,
perhaps, and be perplexed, and even anxious about her. But in the next
moment she dismissed the idea of any such anxiety on her behalf.
‘Lina will not think about me while Mr. Goring is with her; and my
father is not likely to trouble himself. There is only poor Edgar, and
he will guess which way I have come, and follow me if he takes it into
his head to be uneasy.’
Reassured by this idea, Daphne resolved to gratify her fancy for
farewells to the uttermost, and to say good-bye to the house where the
poet was born. Stratford streets were very empty and quiet at this
period of the summer evening, and she met only a few people between
the churchyard and the sacred dwelling. To a stranger, entrance into
the sanctuary at such an hour would have been out of the question; but
Daphne was on friendly terms with the lady custodians of the temple,
and knew she could coax them to unlock the door for her pleasure. Never
lamp or candle was admitted within the precincts, but on such a night
as this there would be no need for artificial light; and Daphne only
wanted to creep into the quaint old rooms, to look round her quietly
for a minute or two, and feel the spirit of the place breathing poetry
into her soul.
‘I have such a strange fancy that I may never see these things again,’
she said to herself as she stood in the moonlit garden, where only such
flowers grew as were known in Shakespeare’s time.
The two ladies lived in a snug little house with a strictly Elizabethan
front, and casement windows that looked into the poet’s garden. All
that taste, and research, and an ardent love could do had been done to
make Shakespeare’s house and its surroundings exactly what they were
when Shakespeare lived. The wise men of Stratford had brought their
offerings, in the shape of old pictures, and manuscripts, and relics
of all kinds; the rooms had been restored to their original form and
semblance; and pilgrims from afar had no longer need to blush for the
nation which owned such a poet and held his memorials so lightly. A
very different state of things from the vulgar neglect which obtained
when Washington Irving visited Stratford.
The maiden warders of the house were a little surprised at so late a
visit, but received Daphne kindly all the same, and were disposed to be
indulgent to girlish enthusiasm in so worthy a cause. It was against
the rules to open the house at so late an hour; but as no light was
needed, Daphne should be allowed just to creep in, and bid good-bye to
the hearth beside which Shakespeare had played at his mother’s knees.
‘One would think you were going away for a long while, Miss Lawford,’
said one of the ladies, smiling at Daphne’s eager face.
It was exactly what the sexton had said, and Daphne made the same
answer as she had given him.
‘One never knows,’ she said.
‘Ah, but we know. You are coming home to be married in the autumn. We
have heard all about it. Stratford Bells will ring a merry peal on that
day, I should think; though I suppose the wedding will be at Arden
Church. I am so glad you are going to settle in the neighbourhood, like
your sister. What a grand place Goring Abbey is, to be sure! My sister
and I drove over in a fly last summer to look at it. We went all over
the house and grounds. It is a beautiful place. Yet I don’t know but
that I like Mr. Turchill’s old manor-house best.’
‘So do I,’ answered Daphne absently.
‘Of course you do!’ cried the other sister, laughing. ‘That’s only
natural.’
They all three went across the garden in the moonlight, and the elder
sister unlocked the house-door.
‘Would you like go in alone?’ she asked. ‘You are not afraid of
ghosts?’
‘Of Shakespeare’s ghost? No, I should dearly love to see him. I would
fall on my knees and worship the beautiful spirit.’
‘Go in, then. We’ll wait in the garden.’
Daphne went softly into the empty house. It was more ghostly than the
church—more uncanny in its emptiness. She felt as if the disembodied
souls of the dead were verily around and about her. That empty hearth,
on which the moonbeams shone so coldly; those dusky walls; a vacant
chair or two; a gleam of coloured light from an old scrap of stained
glass. How cold it all felt in its dismal loneliness. She tried to
conjure up a vision of the poet’s home three hundred years ago—in its
old-world simplicity, its homely comfort and repose; a world before
steam-engines, gas, and electricity; a world in which printing and
gunpowder were almost new. To think of it was like going back to the
childhood of this earth.
Daphne left the outer door ajar, and crept softly through the rooms,
half expectant of ghostly company. What tricks moonbeam and shadow
played upon the walls, upon the solid old timber crossbeams, where in
the unregenerate days, a quarter of a century ago, pilgrims used to
pencil their miserable names upon the wood or whitewash, childishly
fancying they were securing to themselves a kind of immortality.
Daphne stood by the window with her heart beating feverishly, and her
ear strained to catch the footfall of the sisters in the garden, and
thus to be sure of human company. She looked along the empty street,
moonlighted, peaceful; even the tavern over the way a place of seeming
tranquillity, notable only by its glimmering window and red curtain.
The silence and shadowiness of the house were beginning to frighten her
in spite of her better reason, when a step came behind her—a firm light
tread which her ear and heart knew too well. It seemed almost as if her
heart stopped beating at the sound of that footfall. She stood like a
thing of marble, scarce breathing. The step had crossed the threshold
of the outer room, and was drawing nearer, when an eager voice outside
broke the spell:
‘Is she there? Have you found her?’
It was Edgar’s voice at the outer door.
‘Yes. Where else should she be?’ answered Gerald Goring.
‘Well, my lady, I hope you are satisfied with the nice little dance you
have led us,’ he said to Daphne as coolly as if he had been talking to
a refractory child.
‘You need not have troubled yourself about me,’ she answered curtly. ‘I
told Lina I was coming for a walk. How did Edgar know I was here?’
‘Edgar knew nothing,’ answered Gerald, with a light laugh that was
something too scornful for perfect friendship. ‘Edgar would as soon
have looked for you at Guy’s Cliff or Warwick Castle, or in the moon.
I knew you were nothing if not Shakespearian; and when I heard you had
taken your boat I guessed you had gone to worship at your favourite
shrine. We heard of you at the church, and hunted for you among the
trees and tombs.’
‘And then we went back to the landing-stage, where you always stop,
don’t you know, when you go as far as Stratford, and finding you had
not come back for your boat, I was almost in despair. But Gerald
suggested Shakespeare’s birthplace, and here we are.’
It was Gerald, then, who had found her; it was Gerald whose quick
sympathy, prompt to divine her thoughts, had told him where she would
be. Her future husband, the man to whom she was bound, had guessed
nothing, had no faculty for understanding her fancies, whims, and
follies. How wide apart must she and he remain all their lives, though
nominally one!
They all three went quietly back to the garden, where the sisters were
waiting, amused at Daphne’s folly, and thinking it quite the most
charming thing in girlhood; for to these vestals Shakespeare was a
religion.
‘I am really very sorry to have caused you so much trouble,’ said
Daphne, apologising in a general way; ‘but I had no idea my absence
would give anyone concern. Perhaps I have been longer than I intended
to be.’
‘It struck ten a quarter of an hour ago,’ said Edgar.
‘That’s really dreadful; I had no idea it was so late.’
Daphne bade the sisters good-bye, apologising humbly for her nocturnal
visit. They went to the garden-gate with her, and stood there watching
the light slim figure till it vanished in the moonlight, full of
interest in her prettiness and her fancies.
‘Is it not a sweet face?’ asked one.
‘And was it not a sweet idea to come and bid good-bye to this house
before she went abroad?’ said the other.
Daphne and her companions walked down to the landing-stage, talking
very little by the way. Edgar and his betrothed side by side, Gerald
walking apart with a cigar.
Daphne wanted to row, but Edgar insisted on establishing her in the
stern, wrapped in a shawl which he found in the boat. He took the
sculls, and Gerald reclined in the bows, smoking and looking up at the
night sky.
It was a lovely night, all the landscape sublimated by that glory of
moonbeam and shadow into something better and more beautiful than
its daylight simplicity; every little creek and curve of the river a
glimpse of fairyland; all things so radiantly and mysteriously lovely
that Daphne almost hoped to see the river-god and his attendant nymphs
disporting themselves in some reedy shallow.
‘On such a night as this one would expect to see the old Greek gods
come back to earth. I can’t help feeling sorry sometimes, like Alfred
de Musset, that they are all dead and gone,’ she said, looking with
dreamy eyes down the moonlit tide across which the shadows of the
willows fell so darkly.
‘I think, considering the general tenor of their conduct, every
proper-minded young lady ought to feel very glad we have got rid of
them,’ said Gerald, throwing away the end of his cigar, which fizzed
and sparkled and made a little red spot in the moonlit water, a light
that was of the earth earthy amidst all that heavenly radiance. ‘How
would you like to be run away with by a wicked old man disguised as a
bull; or to have the earth open as you were gathering daffodils, and a
still wickeder old gentleman leap out of his chariot to carry you off
to Tartarus?’
‘How dare you call Zeus old?’ cried Daphne indignantly. ‘The gods were
for ever young.’
‘Well, he was a family man at any rate, and ought to have known better
than to go masquerading about the plains and valleys when he ought to
have been sitting in state on Olympus,’ answered Gerald. ‘Now such a
river on such a night as this puts me in mind of old German legends
rather than of Greek gods and goddesses. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised
if Miss Daphne Lawford were suddenly to develop into an Undine, and
take a header into the river, cleaving the silvery tide, and going
down to depths beyond any earthly fathom-line, leaving Turchill and me
aghast in the boat.’
‘I have often envied Undine,’ answered Daphne; ‘I love the river so
dearly that years ago I used really to fancy that there must be a
bright world underneath it, where there are gnomes and fairies, and
where one might be happy for ever. Even now, though I have left off
believing in fairies, I cannot help thinking that there is profound
peace at the bottom of this quiet river.’
‘If you were to go down experimentally in a diving-bell, I’m afraid
you’d find only profound mud,’ said Gerald, with his cynical laugh.
Since his return from Canada he had treated Daphne much in the old
fashion—as if she were a child upon whose foolishness his wisdom looked
down from an ineffable height. There was nothing in manner, word, or
look to show that he remembered that one fatal moment of self-betrayal,
when his passionate heart gave up its secret.
‘I wonder what Daphne will think of this turbid Avon after she has seen
Lake Leman,’ he speculated presently, ‘eh, Turchill?’
‘The lake is a great deal wider,’ said Edgar, with his matter-of-fact
air; ‘and those capital steamers are a great attraction.’
‘A lake with steamers upon it! Too horrible!’ cried Daphne. ‘I shall
not like it half so well as my romantic Avon, though its waters are
sometimes “drumly.” Dear old Avon!’—they were at the boat-house by this
time, and she was stepping on shore as she spoke—‘how long before I
shall see you again?’
‘Less than three months,’ said Edgar, clasping her hand as she sprang
up the steps which Bink had cut in the meadow bank. ‘Not quite three
months; and then, darling,’ in a lower tone, ‘you will be all my own,
and I shall be the happiest man on earth.’
‘Who knows?’ returned Daphne. ‘How can one be sure when one is leaving
a place that one will ever come back to it? Good-bye, dear old river!’
she cried, turning to look back at it with eyes full of tears. ‘I feel
as sad as if I were taking my last look at you.’