"You may laugh if you choose, but it is as well you should know;" Maud drew up her neck, and retorted stiffly. "Paul has been about the world, and doesn't expect to find people all cut to the same pattern,—only I imagine I shall have to conform to his ideas after we are married, and he has set his heart on getting a house with a private chapel attached."
This was better; the general breathed again. A house with a private chapel? That meant a big house, a stately house, a house he would be proud to go to and refer to. "Oh well, a man must have his fads," quoth he, cheerfully; "and though we have got along well enough at Boldero Abbey without a private chapel, still if one had been here before my day, I don't know, 'pon my word, I don't know that I should have done away with it."
But the above conversation sent Leonore to look again at the photograph.
She was nervous, curiously nervous on behalf of this unknown Paul, of whom every day produced fresh impressions.
As time passed, he assumed a form she had not been prepared for,—and the first joyous flurry having worn off, she felt or fancied that he had in reality been no more fathomed by her sister than she by him.
It will be seen by this that Leonore had herself rapidly altered of late. She had taken to looking below the surface of things. She pondered and prophesied within herself. She perceived the drift of casual observations, and following in thought the byways of life, divined to what they might lead. In fine, her own blunders and mishaps had implanted seeds for reflection, and while less unhappy, she was infinitely more serious than before.
And for Paul Foster's appearance on the scene she grew every day more impatient.
Perhaps she was altogether mistaken about him, and the being of her imagination would prove so unlike the reality that doubts and misgivings would fly to the winds, made ridiculous by a very ordinary individual, devoid of all the mystery, all the glamour cast over him in day-dreams?
If so, of course she would be glad; it would be the best possible thing to happen; and yet? "I shall have to get rid of this Paul from my thoughts somehow," she decided. "He worries me. If he would only come and be done with it!"
It was evident that Maud attached a certain éclat to her lover's piety; she recurred to the subject more than once.