They only knew, like the impassioned boy and girl in the beautiful story of Bernardin St. Pierre, that they loved each other very dearly, and for the sweet present that sufficed; while cunning Shafto Gyle looked darkly, gloomily, and enviously on them.
Perhaps it was his fast failing health that prevented Lennard Melfort from looking more closely into this matter, or it may be that he remembered the youthful love of his own heart; for he could never forget her whom he was so soon to join now, and who, 'after life's fitful fever,' slept by the grey wall of Revelstoke, within sound of the restless sea.
Dulcie's father, Lawyer Carlyon, heard rumours of these meetings and rambles, and probably liked them as little as the Major did; but he was a busy man absorbed in his work, and had been used to seeing the pair together since they were toddling children. Lennard, perhaps, thought it was as well to let them alone, as nothing would come of it, while the lawyer treated it surlily as a kind of joke.
'Why, Dulcie, my girl,' said he one day, 'what is to be the end of all this philandering but spoiling your own market, perhaps? Do you expect a young fellow to marry you who has no money, no prospects, no position in the world?'
'Position he has,' said poor Dulcie, blushing painfully, for though an only and motherless child she stood in awe of her father.
'Position—a deuced bad one, I think!'
'The other two items will come in time, papa,' said Dulcie, laughing now.
'When?'
Dulcie was silent, and—for the first time in her life—thought sadly, 'Yes, when!' But she pressed a pretty white hand upon the silver locket in her bosom, as if to draw courage therefrom as from an amulet.
'Why, lass, he can't keep even the roof of a cob cottage over your head.'