CHAPTER XXVII.—ON CIRCUMVENTING A STAG.
IF Edmund Airey had a good deal to think about in Norway, Harold Wynne was certainly not without a subject for thought in Scotland.
It was with a feeling of exultation that he had sat in the bows of the cutter Acushla on her return to her moorings after that seal-hunt which everyone agreed had been an extraordinary success. Had this expression of exultation been noticed by Lady Innisfail, it would, naturally, have been attributed by her to the fact that he had been in the boat that had made the largest catch of seals. To be sure, Miss Craven, who had observed at least a change in the expression upon his face, did not attribute it to his gratification on having slaughtered some seals, but then Miss Craven was more acute than an ordinary observer.
He felt that he did well to be exultant, as he looked at Beatrice Avon standing by the side of Lord Innisfail at the tiller. The wind that filled the mainsail came upon her face and held her garments against her body, revealing every gracious curve of her shape, and suggesting to his eyes a fine piece of sculpture with flying drapery.
And she was his.
It seemed to him when he had begun to speak to her in the solemn darkness of the seal-cave, that it was impossible that he could receive any answer from her that would satisfy him. How was it possible that she could love him, he had asked himself at some agonizing moments during the week. He thought that she might possibly have come to love him in time, if she had not been with him in the boat during that night of mist, when the voice of Helen Craven had wailed round the cliffs. Her arrival at the Castle could not but have revealed to her the fact that she might obtain an offer of marriage from someone who was socially far above him; and thus he had almost lost all hope of her.
And yet she was his.
The course adopted by his friend Edmund Airey had astonished him. He could not believe that Airey had fallen in love with her. It was not consistent with Airey’s nature to fall in love with anyone, he believed. But he knew that in the matter of falling in love, people do not always act consistently with their character; so that, after all, Airey might be only waiting an opportunity to tell her that he had fallen in love with her.