At the same time people do not fall in love with each other absolutely without rhyme or reason. And these two did not. Of course personal appearance had, in the first instance, something to do with it.
To a girl of Rachel's disposition (or, indeed, of any other disposition), nothing in the whole catalogue of manly graces could have been more captivating than that quiet air of power and dignity which was the chief characteristic of her hero's person and bearing.
And Mr. Dalrymple, who was not the kind of man to be at any time insensible to the charm of a sweet face, had had sufficient experience to understand and appreciate the peculiar charm of this one—its unaffected modesty and candour; and he had had, moreover, little of anything to charm him in his later wandering years.
And Rachel was not merely a pretty girl, by any means. Being of a most unselfish, unassuming, kindly nature, and having a subtle apprehension of the general fitness of things, her manners were exceedingly gracious and winning—not always conventional, perhaps, but always refined and modest; and that honest youthful enthusiasm for life and its good things, which more or less flavoured all she said and did, though inimical to the prejudices of the British matron, was a charming thing to men.
Then Mr. Dalrymple had the faculty to perceive what made her look at him with so peculiarly wistful and earnest a look; he recognised his friend, if not his love and mate, in the earliest hours of their acquaintance. A friend in so fair a shape was doubly a friend naturally; and the strong appetite that he had for friendship, as a rudimental phase of passion, had had little to feed on but bitter memories for more than a dozen years.
As for Rachel, it was almost inevitable that she should lose her heart to this hero of romance—this Paladin with a touch of the demon in him—whom circumstances combined to present to her under such singularly impressive auspices. If the truth must be told, she fell in love much more suddenly and hopelessly than he did; and the fates—incarnate in the persons of his enemies—did their best to precipitate the catastrophe.
On the morning following their strange interview in the conservatory—of which she had been dreaming all night—she awoke with a dim sense of something being wrong. It was so very dim a sense that she did not consciously apprehend it, and therefore made no investigation into its origin. But instead of jumping out of bed as usual, eager to plunge at once into the unknown joys of a new day, she lay still until obliged to get up to receive her tea, and gazed pensively into vacancy.
It was just such a morning as yesterday—the sun shining in through the white blind, the fresh wind rustling along the leafy verandahs, the magpies gossiping cheerily in great flocks about the garden; and there was that sweetest baby cooing like a little wood pigeon as he was carried past her door in his nurse's arms. But she was deaf to these erewhile potent influences.
"Your hot water, miss," quoth a housemaid in the passage.
"Thank you, Susan," she responded absently, and continued to gaze into vacancy.