He had held himself in check then, had courted her society under a mask of indifference, for more than one reason. First, because she was rich, and a much-talked-of prize in the matrimonial market; next, because of his jealous fear that Rannock's showy accomplishments and charm of manner had won her heart.
"How could I hope to prevail—a dry-as-dust scribbler—against a man who had been called irresistible?" he asked, when Grace reproached him for his aloofness in that first year of their acquaintance.
"A dry-as-dust scribbler who had written the most pathetic story of the last half century. Every tear I shed over 'Mary Deane' was a link that bound me to the man who wrote the book. Of course I don't pretend that if the man had been fat and elderly—like Richardson—I should have fallen in love with him. But even then I should have valued him, as the young women of those days valued the fat little printer. I should have courted his society, and hung upon his words."
"It is not every novelist who is so lucky," said Haldane. "I think I am the first, since Balzac, whose book has won him the love that crowns a life."
What fairer Eden could there be than that reach of the Thames in a fine August? Other men were turning their faces northward with dogs and guns, ready for havoc on "the twelfth," or waiting impatiently for "the first." But Arthur Haldane, who was no mean shot, and had invitations to half a dozen country houses, behaved like a man who had never lifted a gun to his shoulder. The veriest cockney could not have been happier in that river idlesse, in which a punt-pole was his most strenuous exertion, and to boil a tea-kettle his most exciting sport. The summer days, the golden evenings were never too long, and the crimson of the sunset seemed always a surprise.
"I know you must be wanting to kill things," Grace said one evening; "and you must hate me keeping you dawdling here. I am glad you are not grouse-shooting, for I have always dreaded the moors since my poor Hector caught his death in the ceaseless downpour of one dreadful August day. But why do you not go to your Norfolk friends for the partridge-shooting?"
"You are very kind and thoughtful, but my Norfolk friends were always a trifle boring, and they would be intolerable now, if they kept me away from you."
"That is very flattering to my vanity. But I will not have you tied to my apron-string."
"I will tell you if ever the string galls. Come what may, I am not going to leave the neighbourhood of London till your lawsuit has been settled."
They hoped that everything would be over before the late autumn, so that they could start for Cairo at the right season; and from Cairo they might go on to India. They were of a humour to ramble over the world together; but in the mean time life was so sweet in the Thames backwaters, among flowering rushes and under dipping willows, and on the lawn at Runnymede Grange, that they seldom went as much as a mile afield. Lovers are like children at play in a garden, who dream of the days when they will be grown up and sail through blue skies in a balloon, to find where the world leaves off.