By the time he reached Lake Marigold he had shaken off all those hovering fancies of the woods, which, after all, might only have been the whisperings of those friendly and far-seeing spirits who liked the lad as he journeyed through their lonely pleasure-grounds. John Malbrouck greeted him with quiet cordiality, and Mrs. Malbrouck smiled upon him with a different smile from that with which she had speeded him a month before; there was in it a new light of knowledge, and Gregory could not understand it. It struck him as singular that the lady should be dressed in finer garments than she wore when he last saw her; though certainly her purple became her. She wore it as if born to it; and with an air more sedately courteous than he had ever seen, save at one house in Park Lane. Had this rustle of fine trappings been made for him? No; the woman had a mind above such snobbishness, he thought. He suffered for a moment the pang of a cynical idea; but the eyes of Mrs. Malbrouck were on him and he knew that he was as nothing before her. Her eyes—how they were fixed upon him! Only two women had looked so truthfully at him before: his dead mother and—Margaret. And Margaret—why, how strangely now at this instant came the thought that she was like his Margaret! Wonder sprang to his eyes. At that moment a door opened and a girl entered the room—a girl lissome, sweet-faced, well-bred of manner, who came slowly towards them.
“My daughter, Mr. Thorne,” the mother briefly remarked. There was no surprise in the girl’s face, only an even reserve of pleasure, as she held out her hand and said: “Mr. Gregory Thorne and I are old enemies.” Gregory Thorne’s nerve forsook him for an instant. He knew now the reason of his vague presentiments in the woods; he understood why, one night, when he had been more childlike than usual in his memory of the one woman who could make life joyous for him, the voice of a voyageur, not Jacques’s nor that of any one in camp, sang:
“My dear love, she waits for me,
None other my world is adorning;
My true love I come to thee,
My dear, the white star of the morning.
Eagles spread out your wings,
Behold where the red dawn is breaking!
Hark, ‘tis my darling sings,
The flowers, the song-birds awaking;
See, where she comes to me,
My love, ah, my dear love!”
And here she was. He raised her hand to his lips, and said: “Miss Carley, you have your enemy at an advantage.”
“Miss Carley in Park Lane, Margaret Malbrouck here in my old home,” she replied.
There ran swiftly through the young man’s brain the brief story that Pretty Pierre had told him. This, then, was the child who had been carried away, and who, years after, had made captive his heart in London town! Well, one thing was clear, the girl’s mother here seemed inclined to be kinder to him than was the guardian grandmother—if she was the grandmother—because they had their first talk undisturbed, it may be encouraged; amiable mothers do such deeds at times.
“And now pray, Mr. Thorne,” she continued, “may I ask how came you here in my father’s house after having treated me so cavalierly in London?—not even sending a P.P.C. when you vanished from your worshippers in Vanity Fair.”
“As for my being here, it is simply a case of blind fate; as for my friends, the only one I wanted to be sorry for my going was behind earthworks which I could not scale in order to leave my card, or—or anything else of more importance; and being left as it were to the inclemency of a winter world, I fled from—”
She interrupted him. “What! the conqueror, you, flying from your Moscow?”
He felt rather helpless under her gay raillery; but he said: