As it happened, Captain Rolph was thinking, in a somewhat similar vein, of poachers and dark nights, and opportunities for using a gun upon unpleasant people. But these thoughts were pervaded, too, with bright eyes and cheeks, and he said to himself,—
“He’d better; awkward for him if he does.”
Volume One—Chapter Two.
Mars on the Horizon.
In the drawing-room at The Warren, Mrs Rolph, a handsome, dignified lady of five-and-forty, was sitting back, with her brows knit, looking frowningly at a young and pretty girl of nineteen, whose eyes were puzzling, for in one light they seemed beautiful, in another shifting. She was a Rosetti-ish style of girl, with too much neck, a tangle of dark red hair, and lips of that peculiar pout seen in the above artist’s pictures, in conjunction with heavily-lidded eyes, and suggesting at one moment infantile retraction from a feeding-bottle, at another parting from the last kiss. There was a want of frankness in her countenance that would have struck a stranger at once, till she spoke, when the soft, winning coo of her voice proved an advocate which made the disingenuous looks and words fade into insignificance.
Her voice sounded very sweet and low now, as she said softly,—
“Are you not judging dear Robert too hardly, aunt?”
“No, Madge, no. It is as plain as can be; he thinks of nothing else when he comes home—he, a man to whom any alliance is open, to be taken in like that by a keeper’s—an ex-poacher’s daughter.”