“Will you give me your word not to stir from here till I bid you?”
“Yes,” she answered, faint and pathetic.
“And not to touch the lady when she returns?”
“Yes.”
All in a moment she sank down at his feet, crying as if her heart were broken.
“He will see an angel in her,” she moaned; “and will love her for releasing him.”
CHAPTER XXIII.
At breakfast the next morning Darda waited upon her master, with swollen eyes and a very sullen manner of attention. He was in a strange mood himself, compound of perplexity and exaltation. In the girl’s piteous acknowledgment of his mastery over her, he had warmed to a toleration of her foibles that was almost a regard for her as something a possession of his own. He could secretly applaud that loyalty to her brother, when—after venting itself in rebellion against his own mandates—it sunk from arrogance to a heart-broken appeal to his mercy. Having subdued, he could be gentle with her. Moreover, reason resuming a certain sway over his passions, he felt he had acted hastily in that little question of the “Priest’s Hole.”
But, there was a third and very engaging side to his meditations—a thought that, by stooping his stiff neck to the thread of a little glossy sandal, he had tacitly pronounced himself in humble subjection to the owner thereof; in fact, that by submitting Miss Royston as his proxy of grace, he had indirectly suggested, in thin outline, a declaration to her.
His perplexity was for the brother, with whom matters stood as on the first entrance of Miss Angel; and with regard to whose threatened affaire d’honneur, no hint of apology had issued from either side. Assuredly he could not stand up to the manling and seek to let blood that was of a common source with that of his demi-goddess. As surely, for all his tender respect for that same heavenly ichor, he was not going to lend himself to a solitary peppering from motives of delicacy. But, who was to make the first advances?