"And these girls have him with them always," thought she, as she turned homeward. "What matter is it to me—the acquaintance of a couple of days? why should the idea of him affect me so?"
After this day she sought the vicinity of the rock-pillar and the tarn no more.
She was too open and candid in all her actions, and loved her mamma too well to conceal ultimately from her the pleasant interviews she had by the moorland tarn "with such a delightful young man;" but there her confidence ended; she did not give the additional information that on three successive Sundays, when mamma was too ill to attend church, he had lingered or walked by the side of her basket-phaeton, to the manifest annoyance of the Misses Trecarrel, or that she had faintly promised, some day, to make with him a joint sketch of certain rocks upon the sea-shore; still less did she whisper, that in her secret heart she liked him well, or trusted to time or chance for the establishment of an interchange of thought as yet concealed, "as though the bridge between them was yet too frail to cross;" and Constance, occupied solely by solicitude concerning the now-protracted absence of her husband, did not at first make any inquiries.
Sybil found the stranger's image, his tones and words recurring perpetually to her mind in spite of herself, and she blushed at the conviction. She had few male friends—beyond the burly rector and old village doctor, perhaps none—and certainly none that she had met elsewhere proved so graceful and winning as this unknown admirer. To her partial eyes, he seemed the beau-ideal of manly beauty, while to those of others—even the Trecarrel girls—he was simply a passably handsome fellow.
"Why do I think of him at all?" she would ask of herself: "though so young, he may be married—or engaged—engaged perhaps to that Rose Trecarrel of whom he seemed so much afraid the other day. Yet he may surmise the same of me—I, Sybil Devereaux, married!" and then she laughed at her own conceit.
"There is a depth in the human heart which, once stirred, is long, long, ere its waters again subside," and this depth he had contrived to stir in the heart of Sybil. She who had seemed as bright as the day, and happy as the blackbird that sang on the adjacent rose-trees, became silent and thoughtful and apt to indulge in dreamy moods.
Old Winny Braddon was the first to detect this; and so she set herself to watch, and hence the hints she gave to Constance—hints which caused the production of the sketch-book, with some confusion on Sybil's part, as recorded in our tenth chapter, and she took her young favourite to task in the usual mode of old nurses, by commenting upon the enormity of thinking of love or marriage at her years.
Now Sybil, like every young girl of her age, had her day-dreams of a lover, just such a lover as this, but she had not, as yet, thought of marriage. Such a catastrophe—such a separation from "dearest mamma"—had not quite entered her mind; but now, by Winny Braddon's remarks, it seemed to be thrust upon her consideration. She blushed and felt abashed, as if the modesty of her nature had been assailed, and her girlish mind was filled with a vague sense of dread and awe, she knew not of what or of whom.
However, it chanced that on the last day he had lingered by the side of her pony-phaeton for a few minutes, resting his arms on the side thereof in such a way that she could not, without positive rudeness, have driven off, she had been resolving, but not without a struggle in her heart, that she would place herself in his way no more.
"This must end," had been her thought; "it is most unfair to poor mamma, and is unwise for my own peace of mind;" and it was while she thus determined, he came to her smiling, and leaning on the side of the little phaeton, when the Trecarrels were conversing with the rector's family, said in his pleasant voice,