A faint suspicion that the beautiful girl whom he had seen yesterday for the second time meant something in his life, which no woman had ever meant before, had hung about him since he had left the Sycamores after their first interview; but now, as he walked beside her, he felt that he had entered the enchanted land, that he had passed away from old things, and the chain of his old life had fallen from him. For weal or woe, present with her or absent from her, he knew he loved this girl, the one girl whom it was absolutely forbidden to him to love.
They had talked commonplaces at first, though each was conscious that the flurried earnestness of the other's manner was an absurd commentary upon the ordinary style of their conversation. George had asked, and Clare had implied, no permission for him to accompany her on her walk; he had quietly taken it for granted, and she had as quietly acquiesced, and it so happened that they did not meet a single person to stare at the tall, gaunt-looking but handsome stranger walking with Miss Carruthers, to wonder who he "mought a bin," and proceed to impart his curiosity to the servants at the Sycamores, or the gossip at the alehouse.
"This path is not much used," said George.
"No, very little indeed," replied Clare. "You see it does not lead directly anywhere but to the Sycamores, and so the farming people, my uncle's servants, and tradespeople, back and forward to the park, chiefly use it. I often come this way and do not meet a soul."
"Are you going into the town?"
"Not all the way: just to the turnpike on the Poynings road. Do you know Mr. Carruthers's place, Mr. Ward?"
George felt rather uncomfortable as he answered in the negative, though it was such a small matter, and the false statement did not harm anybody. He had told a tolerable number of lies in the course of his life, but he shrank with keen and unaccustomed pain from making this girl, whose golden brown eyes looked at him so frankly, whose sweet face beamed on him so innocently, a false answer.
"I am going to the cottage on the roadside, just below the turnpike," Clare continued; "an old servant of my aunt lives there, and I have a message for her. I often go to see her, not so much from kindness, I'm afraid, as because I hate to walk outside the park without an object."
"And you don't mind riding without an escort any more than you do walking without one," said George, not in the tone of a question, but in that of a simple remark. Clare looked at him with some surprise; he met the look with a meaning smile.
"You dislike the attendance of a groom, Miss Carruthers, and never admit it except in case of necessity. You are surprised, I see: you will be still more surprised when I tell you I learned this, not from seeing you ride alone in the park--there is nothing unusual in that, especially when you are on such good terms with your horse--but from your own lips."