"And they are welcome to!" retorted Lady Eleanor, laughingly. "I count myself the luckiest girl in the world! I am young, not hideously plain, rich—very rich, Mr. Duncombe says—by the way, aunt, you will be very careful not to mention his name in Yorke's hearing—and I am going to marry the man I have been in love with ever since I was so high. I wake in the middle of the night—and I am glad to wake—and I tell myself all this over and over again. It seems too good to be true, sometimes; but I know it is all true when the morning comes. Oh, yes, I am happy at last!"
"And Yorke is very happy, too?" said Lady Denby. And the moment after the question had left her lips she was sorry she had asked it, and she hastened to add: "But of course he is. Men generally look poorly when they are particularly happy, I've noticed, just as they invariably blow their noses when they want to cry!"
"Why shouldn't he be happy?" said Lady Eleanor, after a pause; but her face had grown almost grave and almost troubled. "As you say, men don't go about as if they were dancing to music, as we women do, and they don't sing as we do. And—and if Yorke is not boisterous—Why did you say that?" she demanded, suddenly changing her tone and turning upon Lady Denby anxiously and nearly angrily. "Do you think he looks dissatisfied—as if—as if he were sorry?"
"My dear child, your love for that young fellow is softening your brain," responded Lady Denby, quietly. "Of course, I have noticed nothing. He is quiet; but I suppose most men who are on the brink of matrimony are quiet. They hear the clanking of their chains as they are being forged, and are thinking of the time when they will be riveted upon them. No man really likes being married."
"There shall be no chains for Yorke!" said Lady Eleanor, softly; "or, if there must be, then I will cover them with velvet. You shall see—you shall see!"
Certainly, Yorke did not go about as if to invisible music, or sing as he went; and he was, as Lady Denby put it, quiet—very quiet. But if he was not boisterous, he was everything else that a woman could desire in a betrothed. He spent a portion of each day at Kensington Palace Gardens. He was always ready to accompany Lady Eleanor to the park, the theater, concerts, balls, and even shopping. Indeed, the patience with which he would stroll up and down Bond Street or Oxford Street, smoking cigarette after cigarette, while Lady Eleanor was shopping, was worthy of the highest commendation, and immensely calculated to astonish his wild bachelor friends. What he thought about as he paced slowly up and down the hot pavements of those fashionable thoroughfares heaven only knows! At any rate, it is well that Lady Eleanor didn't.
Every morning he rode with her in the park—there was no need to sell his horse now or to sack Fleming—and the loungers on the rails as they raised their hats to his beautiful companion growled enviously: "Lucky beggar! going to marry the prettiest and richest girl of the season! Some men get all the plums in this world's pudding!" Altogether he spent a great deal of his time in the society of his betrothed; but there were still some hours of the day in which he was free to amuse himself after his own devices, and he might have passed a very pleasant time, for there was still a large contingent of his friends in town, and there were outings at the Riverside Club, drives to Richmond, and so on. But Yorke was seen in none of the places where the youth of his sex most do congregate; and he spent the hours of his freedom in long walks into the country around London, or in the smoking-room of the quietest of the clubs. And he was always alone—alone, with that strange, absent look in his eyes—that far-away look which lets out the secret, and tells all who see it that a man's mind is wandering either backward or forward; generally backward.
All the world knew of his engagement, and every man who met him congratulated him—all the world except the Duke of Rothbury, from whom no word of congratulation had come.
"Have you written to Godolphin?" Lady Eleanor had asked, shyly, and Yorke, with a little start, had said "no;" that there was no occasion. He would see it in the papers. "But he may not. They only get Galignani in Switzerland; at least, I never could get anything else," said Lady Eleanor. But Yorke had put off writing. He would not have admitted it to himself, but he shrunk from writing to Dolph and telling him that he, the duke, was right, and that Leslie was forgotten. Forgotten! Of what was he thinking as he strode through the country lanes, as he sat in a corner of the smoking-room, silent and moody, but of Leslie? Always Leslie!
The time comes when everybody—excepting a few millions—leaves London.