Already the glamour of love was falling upon her like the soft mist of a Summer evening; blindly, passively she was moving toward the fate which the gods had prepared for her.
[CHAPTER VII.]
Side by side they walked across the meadows; the larks rising before them and soaring up to the heavens with a burst of song; the river running in silvery silence to the sea; the green trees waving gently in the Summer breeze; and above them the long stretching gray masonry of Wyndward Hall.
Lord Leycester was strangely silent for some minutes since that "Are you angry?" and Stella, as she walked by his side, stooping now and again to gather a cowslip, glanced up at his face and wondered whether her uncle could be mistaken, whether they were not all deceived in thinking the quiet, graceful creature with the beautiful face and dreamy, almost womanly, soft eyes, wild and reckless, and desperate and altogether bad. She almost forgot how she had seen him on that first night of their meeting, with his whip upraised and the sudden fire of anger in his eyes.
Presently he spoke, so suddenly that Stella, who had been lost in her speculations respecting him, started guiltily:
"I have been wondering," he said, "how Mr. Etheridge takes the change which your presence must make in the cottage."
Stella looked up with surprise, then she smiled.
"He bears it with admirable resignation," she said, with that air of meek archness which her uncle found so amusing.
Lord Leycester looked down at her.