Alice, who was beginning to have her doubts of Mr. Byron, in spite of his familiarity with Lord Worthington, smiled falsely and drew herself up a little. He turned away from her, hurt by her manner, and so ill able to conceal his feelings that Miss Carew, who was watching him, set him down privately as the most inept dissimulator she had ever met. He looked at Lydia wistfully, as if trying to read her thoughts, which now seemed to be with the setting sun, or in some equally beautiful and mysterious region. But he could see that there was no reflection of Miss Goff’s scorn in her face.
“And so you really took me for a ghost,” he said.
“Yes. I thought at first that you were a statue.”
“A statue!”
“You do not seem flattered by that.”
“It is not flattering to be taken for a lump of stone,” he replied, ruefully.
Lydia looked at him thoughtfully. Here was a man whom she had mistaken for the finest image of manly strength and beauty in the world; and he was so devoid of artistic culture that he held a statue to be a distasteful lump of stone.
“I believe I was trespassing then,” she said; “but I did so unintentionally. I had gone astray; for I am comparatively a stranger here, and cannot find my way about the park yet.”
“It didn’t matter a bit,” said Cashel, impetuously. “Come as often as you want. Mellish fancies that if any one gets a glimpse of me he won’t get any odds. You see he would like people to think—” Cashel checked himself, and added, in some confusion, “Mellish is mad; that’s about where it is.”
Alice glanced significantly at Lydia. She had already suggested that madness was the real reason of the seclusion of the tenants at the Warren. Cashel saw the glance, and intercepted it by turning to her and saying, with an attempt at conversational ease,