Upon Tuesday Sir Donald and Esther drove to the station. A girl friend was expected on a visit from London.
Oswald spent the day in walking about the grounds and viewing the rare beauties of Northfield. Aware that much of interest was being seen by him for the first time, yet he experienced a strange sense of familiarity with many objects in this changing panorama. He took an extended stroll along the banks of the lake. He stops and soliloquizes: "Still the same unaccountable sensation! When and where have I witnessed the counterpart of that timbered bank beyond the curve, with the jutting wooded point in the distance? Why should the waters of a running stream, with the glare of myriad lights, appear in the background of this real landscape view? What have I done that a fleeing, skulking form like my own flits back and forth in the distant outlines? Where have I seen that despairing female face?"
With insistent sense of some fateful impending ill, Oswald returned to Northfield.
Having been gone several hours, the sun was setting when he reached the mansion grounds. Coming up a flower-fringed path, wondering at the chimeras of the afternoon, he saw Esther seated on a bench near a rosebush, and stepped toward her with a pleasant greeting, but cut it short with a startled, "Well!"
The surprised cause of Oswald's exclamation blushed as she looked into his strangely excited countenance.
Thinking there was some mistake of identity at the base of this incident, Esther presented Oswald to her friend from London, Miss Alice Webster.
With much pleasant tact, Esther managed to divert the minds of her young friends from this little mistaken affair to subjects more agreeable.
"Miss Webster has lived in London several years, and is an intimate friend of my cousins dwelling there. She called upon them during my recent visit. I pressed Alice to spend a few weeks at Northfield. We look for a most delightful time.
"How nice it will be that Mr. Langdon can be here and help us to enjoy this treat! What lovely trips on horseback! Such sails on the lake! Miss Webster sings divinely."
Esther's exquisite face shone with genuine anticipation, and Alice seemed hopeful of perfect happiness.