His companion looked up, smiling, her eyes dwelling on his with a strange effect of intimacy, wholly flattering, wholly, indeed, distracting to common sense.
"Yes—you are fortunate," she answered, speaking slowly. "And some day, Richard, I think you will come to know that."
Sudden comprehension, sudden recognition struck the young man—very literally struck him a most unwelcome buffet.
"Oh! I see—I understand," he exclaimed, "you are my cousin—you are Madame de Vallorbes."
For a moment his sense of disappointment was so keen, he was minded to turn his horse and incontinently ride away. The misery of that episode of his boyhood set its tooth very shrewdly in him even yet. It seemed the most cruelly ironical turn of fate that this entrancing, this altogether worshipful, stranger should prove to be one and the same as the little dancer of long ago with blush-roses in her hat.
But though the colour deepened somewhat in the lady's cheeks, she did not lower her eyes, nor did they lose their smiling importunity. A little ardour, indeed, heightened the charm of her manner—an ardour of delicate battle, as of one whose honour has been ever so slightly touched.
"Certainly, I am your cousin, Helen de Vallorbes," she replied. "You are not sorry for that, Richard, are you? At this moment I am increasingly glad to be your cousin—though not perhaps so very particularly glad to be Helen de Vallorbes." Then she added, rapidly:—"We are here in England for a few weeks, my father and I. Troublesome, distressing things had happened, and he perceived I needed change. He brought me away. London proved a desert and a dust-heap. There was no solace, no distraction from unpleasant thoughts to be found there. So we telegraphed and came down last night to the kind people at Newlands. Naturally my father wanted to see Aunt Katherine. I desired to see her also, well understood, for I have heard so much of her talent and her great beauty. But I knew they—the brother and sister—would wish to speak of the past and find their happiness in being very sad about it all. At our age—yours and mine—the sadness of any past one may possess is a good deal too present with one still to afford in the least consoling subject of conversation." Madame de Vallorbes spoke with a certain vehemence. "Don't you think so, Richard?" she demanded.
And Richard could but answer, very much out of his heart, that he did indeed think so.
She observed him a moment, and then her tone softened. The colour deepened yet more in her cheeks. She became at once prettily embarrassed and prettily sincere.
"And then, to tell you quite the truth, I am a trifle afraid of Aunt Katherine. I have always wanted to come here and to see you, but—it is an absurd confession to make—I have been scared at the idea of meeting Aunt Katherine, and that is the real reason why I made Honoria take refuge with me in this lovely park of yours, instead of going on with my father to the house. There is a legend, a thrice accursed legend in our family,—my mother employs it even yet when she proposes to reduce me to salutary depths of humility—that I came,—she brought me—here, once, long ago, when I was a child, and that I was fiendishly naughty, that I behaved odiously."