"What ails my lord?"
"Nothing short of despair," he replied, whilst his eyes rested with a kind of mournful abnegation on the enchanting picture so tantalisingly near to him.
"Is it quite hopeless, then?" she asked.
"Quite."
"An entanglement?"
"No. A marriage."
Outwardly she made no sign. Mistress Julia was not one of those simpering women who faint, or scream, or gasp at moments of mental or moral crises. I will grant you that the colour left her cheek, and that her fingers for one brief instant were tightly clutched—no longer gracefully interlaced—under her chin. But this was in order to suppress emotion, not to make a show of it.
There was only a very momentary pause, the while she now, with deliberate carelessness, brushed a rebellious curl back into its place.
"A marriage, my good lord," she said lightly; "nay! you must be jesting—or else mayhap I have misunderstood.—A marriage to render you moody?—Whose marriage could that be?—"
"Mine, Mistress—my marriage," exclaimed Lord Stowmaries, now in tones of truly tragical despair; "curse the fate that brought it about, the parents who willed it, the necessity which forced them to it, and which hath wrecked my life."