Within the spacious drawing-room of Woodleigh Hall sat three silent people, one afternoon in the early autumn.
Of the three silent individuals one was George himself. Seventeen years had brought a few grey lines into the tawny beard; but they had not detracted from his vigorous strength of frame. At fifty-three he was almost as fine a specimen of manhood as he had been at thirty-six—some said finer. There was a mellowed, softened calmness about the lion-like face not often to be seen. He seemed deeply interested in his book.
These years had not dealt quite so kindly with Dulcibel as with her husband. Instead of rounding and softening, she had grown thinner and more angular. While the fair hair showed as yet small signs of turning color, the features had become rather sharp, the two eyebrows were lifted into permanent arches of anxiety, and troubled lines were stamped around eyes and mouth.
Not that Dulcibel had undergone any unusual amount of trial in the seventeen years of her married life. Facial lines have more to do with inside than outside circumstances. And, after all, it is quite as wearying to be perpetually expecting trouble as to be perpetually enduring it.
The third person was a girl, very young, for she could not have been more than sixteen, and singular in appearance. Nobody except her mother counted Nessie pretty, and Dulcibel thought her lovely, but Dulcibel stood alone in her opinion, as mothers are apt to do sometimes. If George Rutherford was fair in coloring, and Dulcibel fairer still, Nessie supplied a superlative to her parents’ degrees of comparison.
She was rather small, of slender make and colorless complexion; with eyes of the lightest blue, lashes and eyebrows of almost invisible paleness, and limp, long hair of dull flaxen-white. The beauty of which Dulcibel loved to discourse lay in the delicate features, the pure, transparent skin, and the tiny snow white hands. But the cheeks had no tinting; the lips had only a faint hue of pink; the eyes did not sparkle; the face as a whole was devoid of animation. It was tender and refined, perhaps capable of sweetness, but too statuesque. Nessie seemed to have inherited nought of her father’s energy or of her mother’s restlessness.
“Dulcie, I have been thinking—”
“Just in a moment, Georgie dear. I must finish this note. It is almost post-time.”
George was silent, and the pen scratched on vehemently.
“Believe me, yours sincerely, D. Rutherford,” murmured Dulcibel, half aloud, as she wrote the concluding words. “There, that is done! What a bother; I have blotted the last page! Well, it must do.”