"I—" She looked amazed. She seemed caught and held captive in the swirl of some strange power. The colour fluttered up and down her sweet face, and her eyelids drooped, their long, soft lashes making shadows.
"Yes, you said I ought to go; and I shall always be glad I went,"—in a confident tone.
"Your cousin?" she said inquiringly, with no consciousness that a word would swerve either way.
"Yes. You know I told you my father's wishes. That sort of thing doesn't seem queer to continental people. But it was not so much his as the aunt's,—the relation is farther back than that; but it serves the same purpose. She had known about my father, and was desirous of being friends. So after I was home about a week, and had confessed to my father that the prospect of the marriage was not agreeable to me, he still begged me to go."
Hanny looked almost as if she was disappointed. He smiled and resumed:—
"It is a lonely spot on the Rhine, not far from Ebberfeld. We will look it up some day. I don't know how people can spend their lives in such dreary places. I do not wonder my grandmother ran away with her brave lover. The castle is fast going to ruins. There was a brother who wasted a great deal of the patrimony before he died. The Baroness is the last of her race. There is a poor little village at the foot of the mountain, and some peasants who work the land; and then the cousin, who is expected to rehabilitate the race by marrying a rich man."
"Yes." There was such a pretty, eager interest and pity in her eyes that he smiled.
"She is six and twenty; tall, fair, with a sorrowful kind of face, that has never been actually happy or pretty. Who could be happy in that musty old rookery! The father, I believe, did very little for their pleasure, but spent most of his time in town, wasting their little substance."
"Oh, poor girl!" cried Hanny, thinking of her own father, so loving and generous.
"She seemed to me almost as old as her mother. And then she told me her troubles, poor thing, and I found her in heart and mind a sort of inexperienced child. She has had a lover for two years; an enterprising young man, who is superintendent of an iron mine some fifty miles distant. It is the old story over again. I wish he had my grandfather's courage and would run away with her. He has no title nor aristocratic blood, and the mother will not consent. But I had made up my mind before I went there, and even if I had been fancy free, I couldn't resign myself to live in that old ruin."