Mrs. Monckton evaded a direct answer to this question.
“It was you who first taught me to doubt him,” she said.
“Indeed!” answered her husband; “I had quite forgotten that. I wonder, Eleanor, that you should appear so much interested in this young man, since you have so bad an opinion of him.”
Mr. Monckton left the room after launching this dart at the breast which he believed was guilty of hiding from him a secret regard for another.
“God help her, poor child!” thought the lawyer, “she married me for my position; and perhaps thought that it would be an easy thing to conquer some slight sentimental predilection for Launcelot Darrell. She tries to do her duty, I believe; and when this young man is safely out of the way she may learn to love me perhaps.”
Such reflections as these were generally followed by a change in the lawyer’s manner, and Eleanor’s failing spirits revived in the new sunshine of his affection. She had respected and admired Gilbert Monckton from the hour of her meeting with him at the Great Western terminus; and she was ready to love him truly and cordially whenever she could succeed in her great purpose, and disengage her mind from its one absorbing idea.
CHAPTER XXX.
AN OLD MAN’S FANCY.
Although Eleanor Monckton’s utmost watchfulness revealed to her nothing that could be twisted into a proof of Launcelot Darrell’s identity with the man who had been the indirect cause of her father’s death, she made some progress in another quarter, very much to the annoyance of several people, amongst whom must be included the young painter.
Maurice de Crespigny, who for some years past had not been known to take an interest in anything, exhibited a very great interest in Gilbert Monckton’s young wife.
The old man had never forgotten the day upon which he had been suddenly carried back to the past, by the apparition of a fair-haired girl who seemed to him the living image of his lost friend. He had never forgotten this: and when, a few days after Eleanor’s arrival at Tolldale, he happened to encounter her in one of his airings, he had insisted on stopping to talk to her, much to the aggravation of his two maiden warders.