“Hermione,” he repeated it. “Perhaps her beautiful, varied, lovely nature is owing to her name, of all Shakespeare’s heroines to my mind fairest and best.”
He hardly remembered the existence of Clarice Severn; she was but Hermione’s friend. He did not even remember her delight at seeing him again. The proud, passionate beauty of her face had not moved him.
“Strange that I should have loved Hermione best even as a child. I wish she were a child now, that I could hold her in my arms and kiss her and call her my own wife.”
It was love, not exactly at first sight, for he had cared for her even when she was a child, but in the engrossing pursuits of traveling, in the excitement caused by his uncle’s illness and death, the image of the charming child had, in some measure, faded from his mind. When he saw her again the old love revived, and took fresh shape. It was no longer as a child, but as a woman, that he worshiped her.
When Sir Ronald reached home he found an old friend there awaiting him, Kenelm Eyrle, of The Towers, with whom he had been both at Eton and Oxford.
They had been almost like brothers together, coming from the same neighborhood and knowing the same people, having the same friends, and, in a great measure, the same tastes. One might have traveled far on a summer’s day and not have found a fairer-looking, more thoroughly admirable man than Kenelm Eyrle. He was three years older than his friend, and had traveled much. He united in himself the polish of a foreigner with the candor of an Englishman.
I do not know that he was so popular as Sir Ronald, for Kenelm had a kind of half-haughty grace with him that produced great effect. People at first sight considered him proud and haughty; they were apt to take away with them a somewhat disagreeable and untruthful impression of him; but if in the hour of distress you needed a friend, if in adversity you needed help, if in trouble you wanted succor, then the value of Kenelm Eyrle’s sterling character came to light. He was always, as an old soldier expressed it, to the front. Others might fail; he never did.
And now the two friends, who had parted youths, met as men, with a hearty clasp of the hand, an Englishman’s only way of expressing delight and emotion.
“I only returned from Egypt last week,” said Kenelm. “A sudden fancy to see the pyramids took possession of me, and I went.”
Sir Ronald laughed.