Self-deluded and mistaken now, it was scarcely strange if he deceived Eleanor Vane, who was carried away by the impetuous torrent of words in which he told her that he loved her, and that the future happiness of his life depended upon the fiat which must issue from her lips.
Only very faltering accents came from those tremulous lips. Miss Vane was not in love; she was only bewildered, and perhaps a little bewitched, by the painter’s vehemence. He was the first young, elegant, handsome, and accomplished man with whom she had ever been thrown much in contact. It is scarcely wonderful, then, if this inexperienced girl of eighteen was a little influenced by the ardour of his admiration—by the eloquence of his wild talk.
She had risen from her seat in her agitation, and stood with her back to the sunlit window, trembling and blushing before her lover.
Launcelot Darrell was not slow to draw a flattering inference from these signs of womanly confusion.
“You love me, Eleanor,” he said; “yes, you love me. You think, perhaps, my mother would oppose our marriage. You don’t know me, dearest, if you can believe I would suffer any opposition to come between me and my love. I am ready to make any sacrifice for your sake, Eleanor. Only tell me that you love me, and I shall have a new purpose in life; a new motive for exertion.”
Mr. Darrell held the girl’s two hands clasped in both his own, as he pleaded thus, using hackneyed phrases with a vehement earnestness that gave new life to the old words. His face was close to Eleanor’s, with the broad light of the sunny summer sky full upon it. Some sudden fancy—some vague idea, dim and indistinct as the faint memory of a dream whose details we strive vainly to recall—flashed into the mind of George Vane’s orphan daughter as she looked into her lover’s black eyes. She recoiled from him a little; her eyebrows contracted into a slight frown: her blushes faded out with the effort which she made to seize upon and analyze that sudden fancy. But her effort was vain: transient as a gleam of summer lightning the thought had flashed across her brain, only to melt utterly away.
While she was still trying to recall that lost idea, while Launcelot Darrell was still pleading for an answer to his suit, the door of the painting-room was pushed open—it had been left ajar by volatile Miss Mason, most likely—and the widow entered, pale, stern, and sorrowful-looking.
CHAPTER XX.
RECOGNITION.
“I thought Laura was with you,” Mrs. Darrell said, rather sharply, as she scrutinized Eleanor’s face with no very friendly eyes.
“She was with us until a few minutes ago,” Launcelot answered, carelessly; “but she was called away to see a milliner or a dressmaker, or some such important personage in the feminine decorative art line. I don’t believe that young lady’s soul ever soars above laces and ribbons, and all those miscellaneous fripperies which women dignify by the generic title of their ‘things!’”