‘Isn’t it?’ said Otho, with a kind of brusque facetiousness which had its effect in making him popular with some of his dependants. ‘I wish I knew how you managed to avoid it. This affair—Miss Askam’s coming, has taken me very much by surprise.’

‘Oh, I didn’t mean that exactly, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparkes, pleased at the confidence reposed in her. ‘There’s some things can’t be provided for, but I meant things in general.’

‘Ah! well, you’ll remember what I said,’ remarked Otho; and Mrs. Sparkes bowed herself out.

Then he called for his horse again, and set off for his long-delayed visit to the Townend Mills. It need hardly be said that these calls were wholly perfunctory. Gilbert, from his London office, gave the orders, and Roger Camm in his Bradstane one carried them out. Otho had a pleasure in calling and looking round now and then, because he knew how Michael and Sir Thomas Winthrop hated the Bradstane Jute Co., Limited, and that Roger Camm hated him, Otho, the man who had found the money for it. The conclusion to which he had come by the time that he halted in the mill-yard was that, having settled all things, he had now just one week of liberty before him, and, putting his sister from his mind, he resolved to think no more about her until her arrival should force him to do so.

CHAPTER XII
ELEANOR

Otho’s week of freedom was over. His sister had come, and on the day following her arrival, in the afternoon, she rode with him through Bradstane town towards Balder Hall.

Any one who could have seen her, even in the gray and mournful November light, would have seen a very beautiful young woman. She was tall, and had an admirable figure, full of grace and strength. No feeble development here, nor niggard traits, nor look of feeble spine or over-sensitive nerves. Whatever the intellect within that beautiful head, its outward case was not one to find fault with. Her features were not very regular; harmonious, though, in their very irregularity. A soft, ivory-white complexion, as healthy as many a ruddy one; and with this complexion, the red-brown hair and lambent, tawny eyes which sometimes accompany it. Her eyebrows were much darker than either her hair or her eyes; and she had a large mouth, but a beautiful one—beautiful because of its smile in mirth and of its expression in repose.

There was a vague, indefinite family likeness between her and the fierce-looking Otho. Where it lay, in what exactly it consisted, it would have been impossible to say, but it was there, though it was slight, and perhaps more easily to be detected when they were apart than when they were together; that is, seeing one of them alone, an observer might have thought, ‘How like her brother’ or ‘his sister!’ And yet, had the other one appeared, and the faces been compared, none could have discerned any resemblance.

During the first part of their ride they were both somewhat silent. She was looking about her with quick, keen glances, speaking an observant eye. Otho was wondering what Magdalen would say to him, what he could say to her, at a later time, when he, after his offhand description of the other day, had to introduce to her this beautiful creature now riding with him.

Eleanor, while making her observations on the town and the surroundings, was also occupied in thinking things over. It was a fact, she told herself with some mortification, that Otho and she were strangers to each other. It seemed that absence, and long separation, and the influence of utterly diverse lives and habits did produce that strangeness, even between brother and sister. Her Aunt Emily, in some of their talks, had told her that this would be the case, and she had said laughingly that she would defy her brother to be a stranger to her, or to make a stranger of her. She had felt very strong; she felt very strong now. That was her chief feeling, when she thought about herself at all—strength of soul and body, and a happy confidence that truth is great and will prevail.