‘Mr. Langstroth saved me from getting out a station too soon,’ she said, turning to Otho, in explanation. She could not help seeing that his moody countenance wore anything but one of its lighter expressions. He stood stiffly, his hat and whip in his hand, and a fleeting side-glance had shown her that he and the stranger (was he any relation, she wondered, to Otho’s great friend, Gilbert Langstroth, who was coming down for Christmas?) had exchanged a very slight and indifferent acknowledgment of each other’s presence.

Michael Langstroth, now standing upright, looking on, betrayed no feeling of any kind as he heard her remark. It was five years now since he had had a letter from Magdalen, which had gone near to turning his brain. Such episodes have the effect upon those who receive them of, to use a vulgarism, killing or curing. Michael had been cured; hence his presence in Magdalen’s boudoir now; hence his ability to stand by and take in the comedy of the situation, and to feel decidedly, if a little sardonically, amused at what was taking place.

He did not sit down again. He wished Magdalen good afternoon; and Eleanor noticed that, although polite—she had a strong conviction that under no possible combination of circumstances could he be impolite—he was not what could be called genial. He was grave and distant, and however slight this gravity and distance, they were present, and Eleanor, keenly sensitive to manner and expression, noticed them instantly. Michael said he would call again in a few days, bowed to them all, and took his departure.

‘Now, Otho,’ said Miss Wynter, almost before Michael had left the room, ‘I have something to tell you. I had better do it now, before I forget. Briggs has got a very wonderful colt to show you, and has been expressing the most ardent longing——’

‘Briggs—a colt!’ exclaimed Otho, with unaffected interest and animation; ‘I’ll go to him this minute. I suppose he is at the stables?’

‘I suppose so—somewhere there,’ replied Magdalen nonchalantly; and Otho disappeared instantly, while Eleanor sat still, feeling intensely displeased, less at what was actually said and done than at the tone and the manner of it. Fine-tempered and incapable of behaving with insolence or impertinence to any inferior, it yet seemed to her that Magdalen was scarcely in a position to order Otho to the stables, so that she might be left alone with his sister; or, indeed, to call him by his Christian name, and almost openly to hint that she wanted him out of the way—unless, indeed, she were engaged to be married to him, which Eleanor, with a sudden sense of apprehension, hoped she was not; and recalling Otho’s dissertations on their ride hither, she felt it was scarcely possible that he could be.

While she was thinking these thoughts, and while the shadow of them was on her too expressive countenance, Magdalen sank back in her chair, watching her visitor keenly, if unobtrusively. When she addressed her, she spoke with a smile, but her eyes, Eleanor noticed, did not in the least partake of the smile upon her lips. She smiled, not because she felt pleased, or genial, or mirthful, but mechanically—because it is the custom to smile when you receive your guests.

Eleanor, on her part, was conscious of liking less and less the aroma, as it were, of Miss Wynter and her surroundings; but she was aware that this was blind prejudice, and was determined to overcome it if she could. She was very young, and Otho had not been wrong when he had described her as enthusiastic; but she felt a kind of mental and moral chill, or ever she had really entered into conversation with this woman, who had, as it were, been so suddenly flung across her path, and who, she began to realise, must be a powerful influence in Otho’s life. It must be so, she reflected, or he would not thus have been eager to bring them together, and then as eager to leave them alone. Alone, for what?—to discover the innate and latent points of sympathy between them, and to rejoice in them, or to fight out their radical differences to the bitter end?

CHAPTER XIV
THRUST AND PARRY

‘Of course you are quite strange to Bradstane?’ began Magdalen.