He drank, too, with a quiet enjoyment of the good wine, which met with a hearty sympathy from the butler.
"This wine," he said, lifting his glass and bowing to Miss Mildmay with infinite grace, "this wine, my dear friend brought from India—eh? my dear young lady?" turning to Violet. "Many and many glasses have your father and I drank in the hot sunset. I have a wonderful memory for wine and faces. Do you know," he broke off, suddenly, addressing Leicester, who was regarding him with his quiet, earnest gaze, "I fancy that I have seen you before? Have I?"
"I can't say. 'Tis possible," said Leicester. "Have you any recollection beyond the indistinct surmise?"
"N—o," said the captain, hesitating. "Were you ever in India?"
"No," said Leicester. "I have traveled through the East, and know the Continent and England pretty well."
"There you have the advantage of me," said the captain, setting his wineglass down, and looking round at the attentive faces. "I left my native land when a boy of eighteen, and returned only two days since."
"Ah," said the vicar, in his nervous, jerky style, "then you have much to see, Captain Murpoint. England is small, but precious in beauty. It can compare creditably with any other spot on earth, even in its most unfair and ill features. What is softer and more beautiful than Devonshire? What more grand than the Cornish cliffs? Ay, even in picturesque business it would be difficult to eclipse our little island. We defy you to find in any other part of the globe so weird and grotesque a piece of scenery as the Portland wastes."
The captain, with a smile, had turned his left side to the well-meaning, but rather long-winded cleric, and the butler was filling his glass with the wine which he had so highly praised.
Suddenly, as the vicar's neatly turned sentence came to a close, the captain's face turned and presented the left side, which was as white as the scar itself.