'Can you ask me?' said Sir Redmond, in a still lower voice, and venturing; to touch—just to pat—her hand; 'there are many persons whom we may know for years, and yet find them somehow strangers, but it is not so with you and I.'
He now took her hand in his, and saw that it was delicately white—for she had drawn a glove off—and felt soft as velvet; he saw, too, that her white-veined eyelids with their long lashes drooped under his earnest gaze, and that her red lips quivered. Was he actually influencing her already? He could scarcely believe it, even with all his unparalleled assurance.
She glanced nervously round her.
'Do not be alarmed, dear girl—darling Ellinor, let me say,' whispered Sleath, in his most honeyed accents, for who was to call him to account for his impertinence, if impertinence it really was? 'I shall be content to wait—to wait and win your love, if you will but let me hope. Some day—say one day you will listen to me, and I shall tell you more freely, more boldly how I love you—how I shall make you my own!'
Ellinor trembled as she listened to these stilted phrases that came so glibly from his tongue—how often he had said them to others she little knew; and—even Robert Wodrow apart—she had never played with a man's heart as Sleath was now playing with hers.
He said much more, running on in the same inflated style, feeling quite a zest in the, to him, well-nigh worn-out game of love-making; and Ellinor listened. She was far from being a fool, yet she failed to realise that his tones were very second-hand indeed, and that the real expression of his blue eyes, if triumphant, was also false.
Her voice trembled so that she made no response, and the flowers in the breast of her dress rose and fell with the quickened beating of her fluttered and, we are sorry to say, happy heart.
A conviction troubled her, nevertheless, and would not be put aside—that he would master her and compel her to love him blindly by the mere force of his—practised—will, and she strove to resist it.
'You are over-confident, though flattering me, Sir Redmond,' said she, a little defiantly at last.
'And what does that prove?'