Dreamily Annabelle looked at the various objects of art around her—the gigantic Ettys, the sweet proud bride of the victor of Barrosa—the long-hidden Gainsborough—the girl-wife of Grahame of Lynedoch; and then her eye saw the figure of one she recognised again—the woman who had so evidently come between her and Fotheringhame—seated in a corner, apart from all, with her veil half-down, and her eyes fixed eagerly and expectantly on the entrance-door.
The two friends could see that she was perfectly ladylike in style and bearing, in pose and action, and that her costume, though plain and quiet in colour, was rich in material. Wrath and pride flamed up together in the heart of Annabelle, and while shrinking behind a group of sculpture, that she might observe without being seen, she said:
'It seems to me most unladylike, this mode of espionage, and truth to tell it is humiliating in the extreme; but I have neither father nor brother to protect me, Mary, and so I must protect myself.'
'Take courage, Annabelle—perhaps we may deceive ourselves, and—and—oh, good heavens! here he comes!' said Mary, with a kind of gasp in her voice, as Fotheringhame, in 'mufti'—a very accurate morning costume—came with his swinging military step through the long gallery, and raised his hat with a somewhat sad and certainly fond smile on his face, as the unknown threw up her veil and advanced to meet him. But leading her back to her seat, he bent over her, and a low and earnest conversation ensued between them, yet not so low but that some of it reached the overstrained ears of Annabelle.
'It was rash of you to put in that advertisement,' said he; 'and I saw it by the merest chance, as I never examine the business columns of any paper.'
'Rash? but, dearest Leslie, it is rasher still, circumstanced as I am, to visit the castle,' she replied in a sweetly modulated voice.
Her face was a very fine one; her eyes were golden hazel—a perilous kind of eye—'light hazel, the fickle colour,' says a writer, 'the most fickle eye that shines—the eye ever changing, ever seeking something new, ever wearying of what it hath, ever greedy of enjoyment in the present, ever ungrateful for the past and unmindful of the future.'
Such were the eyes of the handsome woman on whom the face of Fotheringhame was bent with tenderness, and what a beautifully moulded face his was, with its heavy, dark moustache, straight nose and well-defined eyebrows.
'If my husband,' she began.
'Don't talk of him, Fanny!' he interrupted, angrily.