It was scarcely likely that a girl of Eleanor’s age, so unaccustomed to all society, so shut in from the outer world by her narrow and secluded life, could fail to be a little interested in the handsome stranger, whose advent had not been without a tinge of romance. She was interested in him, and all the more so because of that which Gilbert Monckton had said to her. There was a secret in Launcelot Darrell’s life. How strange this was! Had every creature a secret, part of themselves, hidden deep in their breasts, like that dark purpose which had grown out of the misery of her father’s untimely death—some buried memory, whose influence was to overshadow all their lives?
She looked at the young man’s face. It had an expression of half-defiant recklessness which seemed almost habitual to it; but it was not the face of a happy man.
Laura Mason was the only person who talked much during that drive to Tolldale. That young lady’s tongue ran on in a pretty, incessant babble, about nothing in particular. The wild flowers in the hedgerows, the distant glimpses of country, the light clouds floating in the summer sky, the flaming poppies among the ripening corn, the noisy fowl upon the margin of a pond, the shaggy horses looking over farm-yard gates, every object, animate and inanimate, between Hazlewood and Tolldale, was the subject of Miss Mason’s remark. Launcelot Darrell looked at her now and then with an expression of half-admiring amusement, and sometimes aroused himself to talk to her; but only to relapse very quickly into a half-contemptuous, half-sulky silence.
Mr. Monckton received his guests in a long low library, looking out into the neglected garden; a dusky chamber, darkened by the shadows of trailing parasites that hung over the narrow windows. But this room was an especial favourite with the grave master of the house. It was here he sat during the lonely evenings that he spent at home. The drawing-rooms on the first floor were only used upon those rare occasions when the lawyer opened his house to his friends of long standing, dashing clients, who were very well pleased to get a week’s shooting in the woody coverts about the Priory.
Neither Laura nor Eleanor felt very enthusiastic about the Raphael, which seemed to the two girls to represent an angular and rather insipid type of female beauty; but Launcelot Darrell and his host entered into an artistic discussion that lasted until luncheon was announced by the lawyer’s grey-haired butler; a ponderous and dignified individual who had lived with Gilbert Monckton’s father, and who was said to know more about his master’s history than Gilbert’s most intimate friends.
It was nearly three o’clock in the afternoon when luncheon was finished, and the party set out to attempt an invasion upon Woodlands. Launcelot Darrell gave his arm to his mother, who in a manner took possession of her son, and the two girls walked behind with the lawyer.
“You have never seen Mr. de Crespigny, I suppose, Miss Vincent?” Gilbert Monckton said, as they went out of the iron gates and struck into a narrow pathway leading through the wood.
“Never! But I am very anxious to see him.”
“Why so?”
Eleanor hesitated. She was for ever being reminded of her assumed name, and the falsehood to which she had submitted out of deference to her half-sister’s pride.