While Lady Estelle walked slowly through the hall, she took her garden hat and wrapped a lace shawl round her shoulders. Quietly, with her usual languid, graceful step, she passed out through the hall into the flower-garden beyond. No sound escaped her lips, and her fair, proud face was unruffled; but when she was there quite alone, the self-control and self-restraint fell from her. She raised her face with a despairing cry to the shining heavens.
"Oh, my God!" she moaned; "after so many years of dread—after so many years of unutterable fear and misery—has it come at last!"
Then she, who had never been seen to shed a tear, laid her face on the green grass and wept aloud—wept as only calm, proud people can weep when the depths of the heart are touched. She lay there a long time, while the sun shone on her, then she roused herself. Tears relieved her for the time; but in this sudden and cruel emergency they did her no enduring good.
"What am I to do?" she cried to herself. "How can I best atone for this folly and sin of my youth? What will they say to me? Oh, Heaven! if I could but die!"
So through the summer hours she wept and moaned. What should she do? The future looked dark as the past. For so long she had been putting off this evil day—fighting hard with her conscience and every impulse of honesty and goodness—hoping against hope that the evil day might, perhaps, never come at all. Yet here it was, and she was helpless.
"If she were here," she thought to herself, "it would not be so bad. I cannot see my way out of this labyrinth." And though she spent hour after hour thinking and planning, she could decide upon nothing.
That evening there was a grand dinner party at Downsbury Castle, and the principal guest was a writer from London, whose name was a power in the government. During the course of the long, stately dinner the great writer, turning to the duke, said:
"You have a famous poet in your neighborhood, or rather you have one who in time will be a famous poet."
His grace, who had forgotten what he had heard of the "gentleman and poet," asked eagerly who it was.
"The author of 'English Lyrics,'" replied the writer. "He lives, unless I mistake, at a place called Lindenholm, on your estate. Unless I make the greatest mistake, that young man has a grand career before him. I should like to meet him."