"Remember!" she panted. "Put a stop to this—this madness of his, and I will give you anything you can ask!"
"I shall not forget," he said. "Let me take you back now."
[CHAPTER XIII.]
Margaret was living in an earthly paradise. Existence, indeed, was more like a beautiful dream to her than the gray and sober reality it is to most of us.
To be loved is a nice thing, a grand thing, a fact which gilds even the most prosaic life and makes it bright; but to be loved by such a man as Lord Blair—so handsome, so brave, so devoted, and so passionately and entirely hers! It passed all saying, as the Italians put it; and Margaret's days were full of sweetness and joy; for if he did not see her every day, he managed to come down three or four times a week, and they met in stolen interviews at the cascade, or in the deeper recesses of the woods.
And Blair—Blair, who had gained for himself the reputation of the most fickle young man in London—seemed more deeply in love every time they parted.
If Margaret had been the scheming girl, aiming at the Ferrers' coronet, which Austin Ambrose at first imagined her, she could not have gone more cleverly to work to secure Lord Blair Leyton.
Once or twice he had brought her down some presents, a ring at first, a bracelet the next time, but Margaret would not accept them.
"I will take nothing I cannot wear, Blair," she said. "Pick this bunch of honeysuckle for me, and I will put it in my hair; I like that better than all your jewels."