“Come outside”—he glanced at the door—“come out of this, and I’ll tell you!”
CHAPTER XIX.
“LOVE CAME TOO LATE.”
Mr. Bartley Bradstone, as he left the garden after his remarkably unpleasant interview with Harold Faradeane, decided to strike while the iron was hot. He had got the net round Olivia; he resolved to draw it tight. From that evening he kept a close guard on himself, and his manner changed—for the better. In fact, to the casual observer he would have passed as a remarkably good-tempered man. He was polite to the servants, deferential to the squire, attentive to Miss Amelia, and to Olivia was devoted and reverential.
Not only the Grange people but outsiders noticed the change.
“Bradstone has improved since his engagement,” said Lord Carfield. “But daily intercourse with Olivia Vanley would tame a savage and educate a bear!”
He watched Olivia as a cat does a mouse, and she was quite afraid of expressing a desire for anything, lest he should rush off and procure it for her.
To Harold Faradeane, too, his manner was quite friendly; and he had plenty of opportunity for showing it, for Faradeane came often to the Grange now.
Sometimes he would walk in after breakfast, sometimes before they had finished. In the latter case, he would sit and talk with the squire until the meal was over; then go round the stables with him, or ride over to some farm on the estate. And Olivia noticed that whenever Harold Faradeane came her father’s face brightened, and lost something of its anxious look. In fact, the old man had conceived a great liking for the handsome, grave-voiced owner of The Dell, a liking that grew day by day into a warm friendship.
To Olivia, Faradeane’s bearing was one of quiet, respectful courtesy. At first the color had risen to her face, and her heart had leaped at his approval; but though his appearance always sent a thrill through her, she learned to master her emotion, and greeted him as calmly as he greeted her.
Sometimes he would be persuaded to walk over and dine with them, and on those occasions she put on one of her best frocks, and was more than usually careful with the thick coils of hair which nestled like a crown of silk on her shapely head. Often she stood before the glass when her maid had left her, and looked at herself with a strange, absent air, seeing not the reflection of her own face, but his, as she recalled it on the day he had bent over her and taken her in his arms.