As she was filling the vases, Lady Rose selected the brightest blossoms and the most delicate tufts of fern from the mass, and laid them upon the purple of the cushion, with a little triumphant glance at Sir Noel, which brought to his lips one of those rare smiles that came seldom to them in these days.
When all was done, the girl gathered these choice bits into a cluster, tied them with a twist of grass; and, gathering up the refuse stalks and flowers in her over-skirt, stole softly to the bed, and laid her pretty offering on Hurst's pillow.
The young man turned his head, as if the perfume oppressed him, and a slight frown contorted his forehead. Lady Rose observed this, and a flood of scarlet swept up to her face. Sir Noel observed it, also, and frowned more darkly than his son.
Without a word, though her blue eyes filled with shadows, and her white throat was convulsed with suppressed sobs, Lady Rose left the room. Once in her own apartment, she tore back the lace curtains from the open window, dashed all the remnants of her flowers through, and flinging herself, face downward, on a couch, shook all its azure cushions with a passionate storm of weeping.
"He does not love me! He never will! All my poor little efforts to please him are thrown away. Ah, why must I love him so? Spite of it all, why must I love him so?"
Poor girl! Fair young creature! The first agony of her woman's life was upon her, an agony of love, that she would not have torn from her soul for the universe, though every throb of it was a pain.
"Why is it? Am I so disagreeable? Am I plain, awkward, incapable of pleasing, that he turns even from the poor flowers I bring?"
Wondering where her want of attractions lay, humble in self-estimation, yet feverishly wounded in her pride, the girl started up, pushed back the rich blonde hair from a face fresh as a blush rose with dew upon it, for it was wet with tears, and looked into the opposite mirror, where she made as lovely a picture as Sir Joshua ever painted. The tumultuous, loving, passionate picture of a young woman, angry with herself for being so beautiful and so fond, without the power to win one heart which was all the world to her.
"I suppose he thinks me a child," she said; and her lips began to tremble, as if she were indeed incapable of feeling only as children feel. "Oh, if I were—if I only could go back to that! How happy we were then. How gladly he met me, when he came home from college! I was his darling Rose of roses then—his little wife. But now; but now—Is that girl prettier than I am? Does he love her? I don't believe it. I will not believe it. She may love him. How could any woman help it? Poor girl! poor girl, I pity her! But then, who knows, she may be pitying me all the time! She almost seemed to claim him that awful night. Oh, I wish that look of her eyes would go out of my mind. But it seems burned in."
Lady Rose had ceased to weep, though her superb blue eyes were still misty, and full of trouble, as these thoughts swayed through her brain. Something in the mutinous beauty of that face in the glass half fascinated her. She smoothed back the cloud of fluffy hair from her temples, and unconsciously half smiled on herself. Surely, the dark, gipsy-like face of the gardener's daughter could not compare with that. Then Walton Hurst was so proud; the only son of a family rooted in the soil before the Plantagenets took their title, was not likely to mate with the daughter of a servant. Looking at herself there in the mirror, and knowing that the blue blood in her veins was pure as his, she began to marvel at herself for the thought.