"Why, what's wrong with him now?" asked Griffith, a little peevishly.
"That was him watering his flowers."
"Oh, is that all?" said Griffith, carelessly.
Leonard said to himself, "I go too little abroad among my people." He made a little round, and it ended in Hernshaw Castle.
Mrs. Gaunt was out.
He looked disappointed; so the servant suggested that perhaps she was in the Dame's Haunt: he pointed to the grove.
Leonard followed his direction, and soon found himself, for the first time, in that sombre, solemn retreat.
It was a hot summer day, and the grove was delicious. It was also a place well suited to the imaginative and religious mind of the Italian.
He walked slowly to and fro, in religious meditation. Indeed he had nearly thought out his next sermon, when his meditative eye happened to fall on a terrestrial object that startled and thrilled him. Yet it was only a lady's glove. It lay at the foot of a rude wooden seat beneath a gigantic pine.
He stooped and picked it up. He opened the little fingers, and called up in fancy the white and tapering hand that glove could lit. He laid the glove softly on his own palm, and eyed it with dreamy tenderness. "So this is the hand that hath solaced my loneliness," said he: "a hand fair as that angelical face, and sweet as the kind heart that doeth good by stealth."