She smiled, as he welcomed her with a passionate ecstatic gaze in his kind, devoted eyes--but the smile was a miserable imitation--and he felt it.
"Come away--from the crowd--I have something important to tell you," he whispered. She gave him a glance of horror, and turned pale. "What?" she stammered.
CHAPTER XI
That terror-stricken gaze of Joan's chilled Vansittart with a vague new dread--a fear impalpable, indefinite--still deadly in its effect upon him.
He laughed as he said, encouragingly, "I can assure you you need not trouble yourself that I have bad news--everything is going most swimmingly!" But as they threaded their way through the groups of brightly dressed girls and young men in all kinds of costumes, from whites to the severest frock-coat permissible at such al fresco gatherings, he gave a name to his misgivings in his own mind.
"I do not believe it is her brain--she is keeping something from me--she has a secret," he thought, as he talked gaily to her, the current small talk of the hour, while they traversed the rich, smooth green turf to reach the path which ran along a terrace by the river and led to the pleasance--"Lady Betty's pleasance" it had been called since the days when a Lady Betty walked there in hoops and pannier, a little King Charles spaniel waddling in her rear. "I must get it out of her! However much we may deceive our fellow creatures, we must not deceive each other."
"Where am I taking you?" he repeated brightly, in answer to her inquiry, although to him it seemed as if a sudden darkness had chased all summer brilliance from the day. "Oh, to a favourite spot of mine--a bench overlooking the river under some tree--a hawthorn, I fancy! We can talk there without any fear of being overheard. My darling--are you quite well? Are you sure you are?"
As they left the open, and were under the trees--a belt of well-grown shrubbery divided the spreading lawns from the pleasance--he stopped, and placing his hands lightly on her shoulders, gazed with such honest worship into her eyes, that she flinched and glanced away. Her lips paled and trembled.
"May I kiss you, dearest?" he almost pathetically asked--his voice faltered. In return she flung herself into his arms, and lifted her lips to his. It was a great moment to him, that abandonment of passion in his beloved--but even as their lips met, and he felt her heart beat against his own, a horrible sensation of despair mingled with the relief her spontaneous outburst had been to him.
She still clung to him after the embrace--her cheek against his shoulder--and he heard her groan.