“Thank you, Arthur. You appear—the perfect knight——”
“Help!”
“You offer all, all that such a girl wants. Voilà!”
“There is something in what you say, Mary. Yes, you are right. I’ll take the road to-morrow. I may not succeed in getting Cicely alone.”
“Then you are not the man I take you to be.”
Mrs. Roden left the dining-room. Wilverley finished a good cigar, quite unconscious of having been “pushed.”
III
Stimson ushered him into the big drawing-room. Left alone for a minute, he stared, as Grimshaw had done, at the full-length portraits on the walls. The ladies smiled down on him. Sir Marmaduke Chandos, the Cavalier, curled a derisive lip, not offensively. He seemed to be saying: “S’death! we need a tincture of blood less blue. Take the wench, and a benison on ye both.”
Lady Selina sailed in, followed by Cicely.
Immediately the man perceived a change in the maid. She appeared to him older. And something had vanished from her face. What was it? Youthful radiancy—vitality——? He couldn’t find the word he wanted. She greeted him with perfect ease of manner. But her hand rested supinely warm in his, and he thought: “How soft her bones are.” Possibly she was tired; and this home-coming must have been a bitter-sweet experience. Beneath her eyes lay shadows, delicately tinted with lavender. All trace of the V.A.D. had disappeared. Her mourning, so he decided, became her. In it she looked distinguished. At any rate, she appealed to him more irresistibly than ever, altogether feminine, a dear woman certain to develop into a noble and gracious personality.