She watched for a moment, musingly, the rounded dome on the distant platform where to-night she had beheld so much in so short a time; where even now he was, no doubt still working at his lofty schemes. Then she tried to peer down through the darkness into her favourite haunt of old, the Herb-Garden—the garden of healing and poisons, where she had so disastrously plighted her young troth.

Shivering a little, for she was wearied with the long journey and the emotions of the day, and it was late, she drew back, closed the casements and sat down by the fire. The place was all strange, yet familiar. The little narrow, carved oak bed, the billowing feather quilt covered with Indian chintz by Miss Sophia’s own hands, nothing had changed in this virginal room after so many years but the occupant herself. There was the armchair with the faded cushions, and there her own writing table with the pigeon-holes; aye, and the secret drawer where her lover’s scrawling protestations had been deposited with trembling fingers....

The hand that wrote them—it had since been raised to strike her! And the precious missives themselves? All that was dust and ashes now; dust and ashes its memory to Ellinor. Yet it was not all a dream after all; and yonder stood the little cabinet, lest she forgot! It had a secret look, she thought, of slyness and mockery.

She pulled her seat nearer the hearth. A wood fire was sinking into red embers between the iron dogs. Leaning her elbows on her knees, she gazed at it, and mused, until the red faded to grey and the grey blanched into cold lifelessness.

It was not of the child, of the girl, of the unhappy wife that she now thought, but of the new roads that opened before the free woman—roads more alluring, more fantastic in their promise than even the ways in which her early fancy had loved to roam.

It was a change indeed from the sordid grey and drab atmosphere of her recent experiences, to be dwelling once more in this ancient mansion, the majestic interest of which she had before been too young to realise; to find herself adopted, with a simplicity that savoured more of the fairy tale than of these workaday times, accepted as their future companion by those two unworldly beings, the star-gazing lord of Bindon and his quaint guardian of old, the distiller of simples.

Yet it was not the thought of her father’s odd figure and his venerable head and his droll sallies that occupied her mind with such absorbing interest as to make her forget the hour, the cold, and her fatigue; in truth it was the memory of the tall, fur-clad figure, of the white hand, and the luminous eyes, and the single moment of that smile. Again she felt upon her lips the touch that had made her heart leap, and again at the mere thought flushed and shook.

CHAPTER VIII
WARM HEART, SUPERFLUOUS WISDOM

Of simples in these groves that grow

He’ll learn the perfect skill;