“She is more than good,” said Sylvester, under his breath, “but—” then suddenly he flung up his head, and said passionately, “I would have run the risk.”
“I think,” said Mr Riddell, after a moment’s pause, “that I should try to look on this engagement as only delayed. If the attachment between them is of a sterling kind, it will survive much.”
“I expect Lucian will set himself to get over it,” said Sylvester. “He’ll think it a duty.”
He was pale, and had an agitated look, and his father glanced round at him for a moment.
“I think I should regard its renewal as still a possibility,” he said. “Here is the turn to the Mount, perhaps I had better go at once to Mrs Leigh.”
“And I to look after poor Lucy,” said Sylvester with some compunction.
But all the time he was wondering who would comfort Amethyst, and thinking that the woe that her beautiful eyes could express, would be deeper than Lucian’s nature was capable of feeling.
Perhaps he was wrong. Lucian was incapable of speech, indifferent to sympathy. He did not care just then whether Sylvester came to him or not. He would not let his mother say a word to him, except on the business necessary to be gone through; no friendship and no family affection could help him then. Like many happy, unemotional young people, he had taken all these sentiments for granted; the first conscious emotion he had known had been his ill-starred love, and now this love was changed into stinging, burning pain. He had once been for some shooting up to the West of Scotland, he would go there now and walk over the moors, and face it out by himself. It was impossible to oppose him, and Mrs Leigh spared him, as much as possible, the anxious cautions which she longed to give.
Mr Riddell attempted little but a squeeze of the hand and an earnest—
“God bless you, my dear boy, and bring good out of evil.”