When she again looked at his kinsman, she found that he had been pressed into a chair beside hers; and that her father, with guileless hospitality, was forcing upon his host a glass of his own choice vintage.
But, as she looked, she thought she could note a flush, kindred to her own, slowly fading from David’s forehead, and, in the hand he extended passively for the glass, ever so slight a trembling. The next moment she was full of doubt: his reserve seemed complete, his presence almost austere. And she blushed again, for her own blushes.
As if to a silent toast, Sir David drained the goblet; then turning his eyes upon her:
“You are welcome, Ellinor,” he said.
The young widow started at the words, and her discomposure increased. There occurred to her for the first time a sense of the strange position in which she had placed herself; of her impertinence in thus coolly announcing her intention of taking up her residence at Bindon, without even the formality of asking its owner’s leave. But after listening a while to the disjointed conversation that now had become engaged between her father and David, the quaintness and sweetness of the relationship between the two men—the unconscious manner in which such whole-hearted hospitality was bestowed and received without any sense of obligation on one side, or of generosity on the other, struck her deeply, and brought at once a smile to her lips and a mist to her eyes.
“To every law there are special exceptions,” remarked Master Simon, sententiously. “David may be quite convinced that I should not have entertained the idea of permitting any ordinary young person of the opposite sex to take up her abode under our studious roof. But a few moments have convinced me, as I said before, that Ellinor may be classed among the abnormal—the abnormal which, as you know, David, can be typically represented as well by the double-hearted rose as by the double-headed calf.” He paused to enjoy the conceit, then insisted: “Represented, I say, by the beautiful no less than by the monstrous.”
“By the beautiful indeed,” echoed the astronomer.
Ellinor glanced at him quickly. But his gaze, though fixed upon her eyes, was so abstracted, that she could not take the words to herself.
Altogether her cousin’s personality baffled her. He had not been one minute beside her, before, in her woman’s way, she had noted every detail of his appearance; noted, approved, and wondered.
This recluse, indeed, seemed to bestow the most fastidious care on his person. At a glance she had marked the long, slender hands, white and shapely, the singularly fine linen, the fit and texture of the sombre clothes of a past mode that clung to his spare, but well-knit limbs. The contrast between this choiceness, which would not have misfitted a dandy of the Town, and his dreamer’s countenance offered a problem which was undoubtedly fascinating.