Louis's entrance checked the reply of Alice. And now he was welcomed to the dear domestic breakfast table, with smiles, instead of the tears which on the foregoing night, lingered in every eye until the hour of retirement.
During the meal Mr. Athelstone made the conversation cheerful, by turning it on general subjects, and particularly enlarging on Sir Anthony's improved manner of life. He had thrown aside all his old, reprehensible habits, and preferring the occasional society of his niece Cornelia, (who, in consequence of the gout flying about him, was now with him at Cheltenham,) his days passed in the equable current of domestic comfort and social respectability.
While the Pastor pursued this discourse, and Louis listened to him with evident pleasure, Alice contemplated her cousin's face and figure; and at last wondered within herself, how she could have thought him so greatly altered. If any change had taken place in his figure, it unquestionably was to its advantage. A certain martial dignity was added to its former pliant grace. It was now a form where every god had seemed to have set his seal to shape the perfect man;—before, it was that of a beautiful youth,—the dawn of this checquered, but resplendent day!
If this were the case, it must then be his black garments, which had at first struck her with some melancholy idea of a change in his person as well as face! she scanned that face with equal scrutiny. To her poetic fancy, his still matchless smile played under the soft moon-light of his now pensive eyes, like the shadowed, yet scintillating wave of her native stream.
At the moment this romantic image crossed her mind, she descried a spot of a deeper hue than the rest, and of the form and tint of a faded leaf, upon his cheek.
"Dear Louis!" said she, pressing affectionately to his side, and putting her finger on the place; "what mark is that?—It was not there when you left us?"
All her cousin's wonted bloom suffused that pale cheek, and obliterated the mark, as she uttered the question. It was the remains of the wound he had received there, in defending the life of Don Ferdinand.
"Do not enquire of all things, sweet Alice!" returned he, as he pressed her hand to his lips.
But he said it with an accent and a look so fraught with tenderness, and a something implied besides, that Ferdinand immediately occurred to her mind, though she knew not why, and casting down her eyes with a blush; she again thought within herself:—
"How could I think that Louis was altered?"