Crossing the garden, he reached the park, and was hesitating as to the direction he should take. Then, in a motiveless way, he went on to a plantation through which a path led toward a beautiful woodland hollow, which was his father’s pride as being the loveliest bit of the park scenery.
Here, just as he reached the edge of the plantation, he caught sight of a figure walking rather quickly toward the woodland, and in a moment he was all excitement again.
“It was the time,” he said to himself. “I was mad to speak to her at such an inopportune moment. She will listen to me now. For she is all that is gentle and sympathetic at heart.”
His steps grew faster, and he was just about to turn to his right, so as to cut off a good corner, and meet the object of his thoughts about a quarter of a mile beyond where she was walking, when he caught sight of his brother going in the same direction as himself, but from another point, and he stopped short with the old sinking sense of misery coming back, and with it the host of bitter fancies.
For there could be no doubt about it, he thought, and not a single loyal honest idea came to his help. She was going toward the woodland, perhaps by appointment, and if not, Alison had seen her, and was hurrying his steps so as to overtake her as soon as she was out of sight.
A curious kind of mental blindness came over Neil Elthorne, and he stopped short in the shelter of the trees, gazing straight before him, till the figure of his brother disappeared just at the spot which Nurse Elisia had passed a few minutes before.
He might have said to himself that there was nothing unusual in the nurse taking that part of the park for the daily walk upon which he had himself insisted, but upon which he had never intruded. And again it might have been accidental that his brother was going in that direction. But, no; the woman he had idolised so long in silence had rejected him coldly, and twitted him with his position. Alison loved her he was sure, and he had gone to meet her. At that hour he was sure of this being the case, and he stood thinking.
Alison was as much engaged as he. Would she listen to him, and would she pass over it in the younger, more manly looking brother?
Human nature is strangely full of weakness as well as strength; and as these thoughts crowded through Neil Elthorne’s brain, it was of the woman he was thinking, not of Nurse Elisia, toward whom for the past two years he had looked up, almost with veneration as well as love. It was the weak woman, not the self-denying, unwearied, patient being who glided from bedside to bedside, assuaging pain and whispering hope and calming words.
Nurse Elisia with her saint-like face was no longer in his thoughts. They were filled by the beautiful woman who preferred his brother to him, and, with a hoarse cry of rage and despair, he strode away, his hands clenched, his brow rugged, and the veins in his temples swollen and throbbing.