"Nor I you, Mistress Sylvia Thorne; for then you were a little winsome child and now----"
"Now I am a woman. One too," she added, while a shade crept over her face, "whom you find in sad and sorry plight. For, as you know, my father has gone from me--from me who loved him so!--and I am here in this beleaguered city, not knowing whether to leave it or stay on and brave the worst. Yet be that as it may, I thank you for coming here, for offering your services to your kinsman on my behalf."
Murmuring his regrets for the loss of her father and also for the situation in which she found herself placed, while protesting that that which he had done and hoped still more to do was nothing, Bevill could not but let his eyes roam over the features of the young woman who stood welcoming him. And, as he did so, he acknowledged how truthfully the Comtesse de Valorme had spoken when she told him that she had the gift of beauty.
For beautiful Sylvia Thorne was, with that beauty on which no man gazes without giving instant acknowledgment thereof, even though that acknowledgment is never outwardly expressed by eye or voice.
The child's large dark grey eyes--perhaps they were a dark hazel--yet who may tell the shade of women's eyes at one swift glance!--fringed with dark lashes, as he had recalled to the Earl of Peterborough, were, of course, the same; but the rest had changed. The dark chestnut hair that, in Sylvia's girlhood, had flowed loosely about her, was now coiled in masses above her white forehead; the clear-cut features that had promised so much in the young girl had redeemed in her young womanhood that which they promised. And those quiet, calm eyes well became the oval face, straight nose, and small mouth, the upper lip being divinely short; while, when Lord Peterborough had agreed that she was passing fair, and the Comtesse had said that she was beautiful yet seemed not to know that she was so, each had judged aright. Also, there was in her the tranquillity that the latter had spoken of, but shadowed, too, by the memory of a recent sorrow. For the rest, she was, like Rosalind, "more than common tall," upright, and full of dignity; a woman who, as years went on--if they were peaceful, quiet ones, with all that should accompany them, such as love, home, and children; years undisturbed by the struggles for triumph or the tears of failure--would develop into a stately, and it may be commanding one.
Doubtless, as Bevill looked on Sylvia Thorne, so, also, she looked to see what changes time had wrought in the youth who, once little better than a stripling, was now a man, strong, firm, self-reliant. If so, what she saw should not have impressed her unfavourably. The handsome features had not altered, but only become more firmly set; the mouth, well shaped, spoke of determination, and told of one who, without obstinacy, would still remain unturned from any resolution he had come to; the stalwart form of the man had taken the place of the tall, promising youth.
Seated in that great hall into which by now the rays of the evening sun were pouring, and to which two servants had brought great candelabra filled with white wax candles, while they had already lit those in the sconces on the pillars, Sylvia and Bevill spoke of what the future might have before them. But that which Sylvia now told the young man seemed scarcely to convey the idea that he had undertaken a journey likely to bear much fruit.
"Since my dear father's death," she said, after Bevill had described some portions of his journey from London, though omitting the fact of his having been recognised by Sparmann, since he thought it inadvisable to tell her that there was danger in his undertaking, "I have lived here with a companion. Almost, one might say, a chaperon, or, as the old tyrannical rulers of the land would have termed her, a duenna. Yet now she has fallen sick--in truth, I think the French have terrified her into a fever. Therefore she has departed--it was but yesterday--to her own people at Brussels, where, however, she will also find the French; and I am alone in this great house."
"What, in consequence, have you resolved on doing?"
"On shutting it up and seeking refuge at Mynheer Van Ryk's----"