"The humble friend—the companion, for it is nothing more in plain English—of the Governor-General's lady. Mamma gone—Denzil, too, in Afghanistan—was I not fortunate in finding such a home?"
"My poor Sybil," exclaimed Audley, gnawing his moustache and pressing her soft hand and arm against his side. Then he became silent, as the past and present, for a little, held his soul in thrall; and far from the brilliant fête of the Anglo-Indian Court his mind flashed back to other days, and he saw again only Sybil Devereaux and the purple moorland, the solemn rock-pillar, the lonely tarn, with its osier isles, the long-legged heron and the blue kingfisher amid its green reedy sedges, and in the soft sunlight the grey granite earns cast their shadows on the lee, as when he had seen her on that day when first they met; and much of shame for himself and for his father mingled with the memory and his emotion.
But there was a change here!
The poor, pale girl, who had so anxiously and wearily sought to sell her pencilled sketches and water-coloured drawings in the shops of the little market town, who so often with an aching heart took them back, through the mist and the rain and the wind, to the humble cottage where her mother lay dying, was now in a very different sphere, richly though modestly dressed, easy in air and bearing, perfectly self-possessed, surrounded by wealth and rank, yet with all the secret pride of her little heart, nieek, gentle, and happy in aspect.
She, too, was silent for a time, during which she glanced at him covertly and timidly.
"Here again was Audley," was the thought of her heart; "did he love her still? Had he truly loved her, even then?" was the next thought, and her heart half answered, "Yes—he had loved her, but only as the worldly love;" and this fear, this half-conviction, dashed her present joy. Yet no woman wishes to believe, or cares to admit even to herself, that the power she once exerted over a man's heart can, under any circumstances, pass altogether away.
"Sybil," said he, "you, any more than I, cannot have forgotten all our past, and the scenes where we met—the wild shore, the precipices, the grey granite rocks of our own Cornwall; and that awful hour in the Pixies' Cave, too—can you have forgotten that?"
"Far from it, Audley,—I have forgotten nothing; and now I must remember the difference of rank that places us so far—so very far apart," she added with a strange flash in her eye and a quiver in her short upper lip.
"Come this way, dear Sybil. I have much to say—to talk with you about—but we must be alone;" and he led her down a less frequented walk, apart from the company, the strains of the military music, the coloured lights and lanterns that hung in garlands and festoons from tree to tree, and the soaring fireworks that ever and anon filled the soft dewy air with the splendour of many-lined brilliance.
"Will this not seem marked?" asked Sybil nervously and almost haughtily.