Sir Madoc's brown manly hand shook mine heartily, and he clapped me on the back.
"I hope to see you yet ere you leave England, my boy, and such hopes always take the sting from an adieu," said he, with a voice that quivered nevertheless. "Sorry you can't stay for the 1st of September--the partridges will be in splendid order; but there is shooting enough of another kind in the preserves you are going to."
"And may never come back from," was the comforting addendum of old Mrs. Davis, as she applied her black-silk apron to her eyes.
"Ah, Harry," said Sir Madoc, "you gave a smile so like your mother just now! She was handsome; but you will be never like her, were you as beautiful as Absalom."
"It is well that poor mamma can't hear all this," said Dora, laughing through her tears.
"Your dear mamma, my girl, was very fond of her and of him, too," said honest Sir Madoc; and then he whispered, "If ever you want cash, Harry, don't forget me, and Coutts and Co.--the dingy den in the Strand. Farewell--anwylbach!--good-bye!"
A few minutes more and all the tableau on the steps had passed away. I was bowling along the tall lime avenue and down the steep mountain road, up which Phil Caradoc and I had travelled but a few weeks before. How much had passed since then! and how much was inevitably to pass ere I should again see these familiar scenes! What had I said, or left unsaid? What had I done, what had passed, or how was it, that as the train sped with me beyond brave old Chester, on and on, on and on, monotonously clanking, grinding, jarring, and occasionally shrieking, while intrenched among railway rugs, with a choice cigar between my teeth, and while I was verging into that pleasant frame of mind when soft and happy visions are born of the half-drowsy brain, lulled as it were by rapidity of motion and the sameness of recurring sounds--how was it, I say, that the strange, unfathomable expression I had seen in the soft pleading eyes of dear Winifred--distance was already making her "dear"--mingled in my memory with the smileless, grave, and tender farewell glance of my pale Estelle; and that the sweet innocent kiss of the former was remembered with sadness and delight?
I strove to analyse my ideas, and then thrust them from me, as I lowered the carriage window and looked forth upon the flying landscape and the starry night, and muttered,
"Poor Winny--God bless her! But two loves for one heart will never, never do. I have been at Craigaderyn too long!"
And I pictured to myself the drawing-room there: Estelle, perhaps, at the piano to conceal her emotions; or listening, it might be, to the twaddle of old Pottersleigh. Winny gazing out upon the starlit terrace, trying to realise the prospect--as women proposed to will do--if she had married Phil Caradoc; or thinking of--heaven knows what! And old Sir Madoc in his arm-chair, and dreaming, while Dora nestled by his side, of the old times, and the boy--to wit, myself--he loved so well.