"Yes, don't you see? Didn't you hear!" opening her eyes. "She is bound to marry him now! Why, it's almost as if they were married already."
CHAPTER XLIV.
HUSBAND AND—BROTHER.
The great duke who built Rothbury Castle was no fool.
He chose the best of the hills, placed his house on the brow amidst a belt of oaks and elms and surrounded by park-like lawns. He made the body and the two wings in a long facade facing due south, and all along the front he ran a terrace of white stone with flights of broad steps leading down to the lawns and Italian gardens, which were then in vogue.
From this terrace a view was obtained which was almost, if not quite, as grand as that which enraptures the gaze from Richmond Hill; while looked at from below, the castle presented an appearance which might well be described as magnificent. Each succeeding duke had done what he could to improve, or at any rate maintain, the ancestral home, and all England was proud of Rothbury Castle.
On an evening in June the duke was seated in his bath-chair in a corner of the terrace looking wistfully and expectantly towards the most distant part of the drive, which wound round and about the tall elms like a yellow snake. Beside him stood Grey, also looking expectant, and every now and then covertly glancing at his watch behind his master's back.
Just below the terrace was an arch composed of laurels, studded with roses; the great flag and the Rothbury arms floated from one of the towers and other flags flapped in the soft breeze from Venetian masts, and lines stretched from point to point of the castle and grounds. Servants in their dark claret livery hurried to and fro or stood in groups looking toward the same spot on which the duke's eye was fixed. The hall door was open wide, and at the foot of the stairs stood the general servants of the household—all of them, from the stately housekeeper in satin to the scullery-maid in her black stuff dress and white apron. In fact, the whole place was in a state of pleasant excitement, and no one excepting the duke in his chair seemed able to keep still in one place for more than a minute at a time.