"Do you mind coming out and telling me which I may cut? I only want one or two to take to London with me, to brighten my dull rooms."
"Certainly," said Stella, moving toward the window. "Are you going to London?"
He muttered something and followed her out, his eyes taking in the lithe grace of her figure with a hungry wistfulness.
"Now then," said Stella, standing in the middle of the path and waving her hand:
"Which shall it be, white rose or red?" and she smiled up at him.
He looked at her for a moment in silence. She had never appeared to him more beautiful than this morning; there was a subtle light of hidden joy shining in her eyes, a glow of youthful hope about her face that set his heart beating with mingled pleasure and pain—delight in the beauty which he had sworn should be his, pain and torture in the thought that another—the hated Lord Leycester—had already looked upon it that morning.
Even as he stood silently regarding her, a bitter suspicion smote through his heart that the joyousness which shone from the dark eyes had been set there by Lord Leycester. He bit his lip and his face went pale, then with a start he came close to her.
"Give me which you please," he said. "Here is a knife."
Stella took the knife heedlessly and carelessly. There was no significance in the deed; she did not know that he would attach any importance to the fact that she should cut the rose and give it to him with her own hand; if she had so understood it she would have dropped the knife as if it had been an adder.
In simple truth she was not thinking of him—scarcely saw him; she was thinking of that lover, the god of her heart, and seeing him as he swam through the river foam. For she was scarcely conscious of Jasper Adelstone's presence, and in the acuteness of his passion he almost suspected it.