"Present you to her in all due form as my future lord and master," declared Gabrielle, with comic solemnity. "There would be an explosion, of course: tears, reproaches, hysterics--mamma is a capital hand at all these, but it comes to nothing. She invariably gives in at last, and I get my own way."
She said all this airily, carelessly, laughing gleefully as she spoke. The thought of a catastrophe which would have filled any other maiden with alarm, was, it appeared, positively diverting to the young Baroness Harder. She had seated herself on the grassy mound, and taken off her straw hat. The sunbeams, which here and there pierced through the thick leafy canopy of the chestnut-trees, played on her luxuriant fair hair and blooming face, whence a pair of great sparkling brown eyes looked merrily forth into the world. The face, with its delicate, pure outlines, was undoubtedly of fascinating loveliness, but it was wanting in that soul-speaking depth of expression which gives to the human countenance its highest charm. Beneath this radiant, beaming gaiety, one might have sought in vain any token of graver, deeper feeling. This want, however, hardly lessened the attractiveness of her fresh beauty, for all about her breathed of rosy youth, of life's happy, blossoming spring-time. She seemed the embodied reflection of the landscape out yonder, sunny and light as herself.
George looked at her with a singular mixture of vexation and tenderness.
"Gabrielle, you treat all this as so much sport, and seem to have no idea of the troubles which menace us, of the battles we shall have to fight!"
"Is the thought of battle alarming to you?"
"To me?" A flush mounted to the young man's brow. "I am ready to cope with every difficulty, if only you will stand steadily by me. But you mistake if you reckon on your mother's customary compliance in this instance, when all her prejudices will be aroused, all her family traditions evoked in opposition. And even if you should succeed in winning her over, nothing will change your guardian's views. I know him. He will never give his consent."
Gabrielle leaned her fair head against the tree's mighty trunk, and plucked carelessly at some blades of grass.
"I do not care for his consent," she said. "I shall not allow him to dictate to me one way or the other. Let him try to coerce me!"
"No one will attempt to coerce you, but they will separate us," replied George. "The very moment our love is discovered, our separation will be decreed. I know it, and it is this knowledge alone which imposes silence on me. You little guess how the secrecy, which has such a charm for you, the continued anxious concealment, distresses and humiliates me; how contrary it is to my whole nature. Now for the first time I feel all the hardship of being poor and unknown."
"What does it matter if you are poor?" asked Gabrielle, carelessly. "I shall be very rich one day. Mamma is always telling me that I am to be Uncle Raven's sole heiress."