"I am the price of something Mr. Herriott alone can sell you? What is it you wish to buy?"
"Your future happiness, and my peace of mind."
"Distinctly, I decline to be sold."
He smiled, put her aside, drew his chair out upon a balcony, and resumed reading his newspaper.
The conversation had been inaudible to Eliza, but, putting out her hand, she rose quickly at sight of a white face where the large eyes glowed as on the memorable day in the pavilion at Nutwood.
Looking steadily before her, Eglah passed into an adjoining room and locked the door. Some hours later she laid a note on Mrs. Mitchell's lap.
"I am going to sit a while in the old Greco-Roman theatre. I shall come back when I am tired. Please ask no questions."
Through one of the arches, built twenty-three centuries ago, she looked out, wondering if any change could enhance the charm that lay like a magic mantle over the visible world. The purple sea broke in a tangled fringe of silver on the curving beach, Ætna, snow hooded, rose a vast altar far away, with thin, tapering feather of smoke floating as incense from its Plutonian cavern; and gaunt, gnarled olive orchards made a luminous grey background for pink plumes of almond trees, scarlet pomegranates, rose oleanders, and orange and lemon groves white with bloom that fell like a fragrant shower on crimson tulips and waxen cyclamen. In the witchery of her surroundings, thronged with beckoning spectres of Greek, Roman, Saracen, and Norman legends, Eglah had hitherto been able to forget on this spot all but the entrancing beauty of the wonderful old cliffs; yet this afternoon sombre shadows seemed to shroud a smiling sea and land, menacing as the smoking mountain that cast its perpetual challenge to a sapphire sky.
The vague anxiety, the tenderly regretful pain long gnawing at her heart, had given place now to angry indignation, and a humiliating consciousness of her father's persistent and increasing desire to barter her, body and soul, for something that Mr. Herriott possessed. Not his great wealth, her own fortune was sufficiently ample; not his social influence, since political aspirations had come to an untimely end; there was no animosity to be conciliated, no strained personal relations existed, only a mild friendship manifested by occasional correspondence. Her conjectures ran around a baffling circle marked only by the starting post, "what?" "why?" Nemesis is not always so intent on pursuit of the culprit that she can forego the parenthetic pastime of striking at the innocent who may chance to stand between, and Eglah had begun to entertain a bitter resentment against Mr. Herriott—the only visible factor in her father's alienation—despite her firm conviction that he would never, by a renewed proposal, smooth the way to a consummation of the desired sale.
The strong sense of dispassionate justice on which she prided herself upbraided her sharply, but the intolerable disappointments of the last eighteen months shook her from the calm, cool heights of impersonal reasoning. As she leaned her bare head against the pillar of an arch through which presageful Greek chorus chants—ages ago—had drifted away to sea, her upturned face was shown in clear relief, like ivory features on a dull-red background. Gowned in grey cloth, she had clustered lemon blossoms around the cameo fastening her belt, and across her lap lay a branch of acanthus, its pale, delicate lilac flowers springing among the curved, glossy leaves.