“I think so too,” answered Monica; and then she quietly left him, without uttering another word.
CHAPTER THE SECOND.
MONICA’S RIDE.
The next morning dawned fair and clear, as is often the case after a storm. Monica rose early, her first thought, as usual, for Arthur. She crept on tip-toe to his room, to find him as she had left him, sleeping calmly—as he was likely now to do for hours, after the attack of the previous day; and finding herself no longer required by him, the girl was not long in making up her mind how these early hours of glimmering daylight were to be spent.
Seven o’clock found her in the saddle, mounted on her glossy black thorough-bred, who, gentle under her hand, would brook no other rider, and showed his mettle in every graceful eager movement, and in the restless quivering of his shapely limbs. His coat shone like satin in the pale early sunlight; he pranced and curvetted as he felt his rider upon his back. Monica and her horse together made a picture that for beauty and grace could hardly meet its match in the length and breadth of the land.
The girl was perfectly at home in the saddle. She heeded no whit the pawing of her steed, or the delighted baying of the great hounds who formed her escort, and whose noise caused Guy’s delicate nerves many a restive start. She gathered up her reins with practised hand, soothed him by a gentle caress, and rode quietly and absently out of the great grass-grown court-yard and through a stretch of tangled park beyond. Once outside the gates, she turned to the right, and quickly gained a narrow grass-grown track, which led for miles along the edge of the great frowning cliffs that almost overhung at a giddy height the tossing ocean far below. It was a perilous-looking path enough—one false step would be enough to hurl both horse and rider to certain destruction, but Monica rode fearlessly onward; she and her horse were familiar with every step of the way, both knew the wild cliff path, and both loved it; and Guy stretched his delicate supple limbs in one of those silent gallops over the elastic turf in which his heart delighted.
Monica seldom passed more than a day without traversing that well-known track. She loved to feel the fresh salt wind as it blew off the sea and met her face. Sometimes it was warm and tender as a caress, sometimes fierce and boisterous, a wet, blinding blast, laden with spray from the tempest-tossed waves below; but to-day it was a keen, fresh wind, salt, and strong, and life-giving—a wind that brought the warm colour to her cheek, the light to her eye and gave a peculiar and indescribable radiance to her usually cold and statuesque beauty.
To-day she felt strangely restless and uneasy. A sort of haunting fear was upon her, a presentiment of coming trouble, that was perhaps all the harder to bear from its very vagueness. She had never before realised that the future would bring any change to the course of her life, save that of gradually increasing age. Not for an instant had it ever occurred to her that a possibility such as that hinted at last night by her father could by any chance arise. That she and Arthur might ever have to leave Trevlyn seemed the wildest of all wild dreams, and yet that is what in all probability must happen in the event of her father’s death. Monica shuddered at the bare idea. Her beautiful dark eyes glowed strangely. It must not, it should not be. It would be too cruel, too hard, too unjust!