'Oh, yes! I know him by sight—every one in Argyleshire knows him by sight.'
'Naturally. A young man in his position must be widely known. Is he popular?'
'Fairly so.'
'His father and I were friends many years ago,' said Lady Maulevrier, with a faint sigh. 'Have you ever heard if he resembles his father?'
'I believe not. I am told he is like his mother's family.'
'Then he ought to be handsome. Lady Florence Ilmington was a famous beauty.'
They were sitting in the drawing-room after dinner, the room dimly lighted by darkly-shaded lamps, the windows wide open to the summer sky and moonlit lake. In that subdued light Lady Maulevrier looked a woman in the prime of life. The classical modelling of her features and the delicacy of her complexion were unimpaired by time, while those traces of thought and care which gave age to her face in the broad light of day were invisible at night. John Hammond contemplated that refined and placid countenance with profound admiration. He remembered how her ladyship's grandson had compared her with the Sphinx; and it seemed to him to-night, as he studied her proud and tranquil beauty, that there was indeed something of the mysterious, the unreadable in that countenance, and that beneath its heroic calm there might be the ashes of tragic passion, the traces of a life-long struggle with fate. That such a woman, so beautiful, so gifted, so well fitted to shine and govern in the great world, should have been content to live a long life of absolute seclusion in this remote valley was in itself a social mystery which must needs set an observant young man wondering. It was all very well to say that Lady Maulevrier loved a country life, that she had made Fellside her earthly Paradise, and had no desire beyond it. The fact remained that it was not in Lady Maulevrier's temperament to be satisfied with such an existence; that falcon eye was never meant to gaze for ever upon one narrow range of mountain and lake; that lip was made to speak among the great ones of the world.
Lady Maulevrier was particularly gracious to her grandson's friend this evening. Maulevrier spoke so decisively about a speedy migration northward, seemed so inclined to regret the time wasted since the twelfth of the month, that she thought the danger was past, and she could afford to be civil. She really liked the young man, had no doubt in her own mind that he was a gentleman in the highest and broadest sense of the word, but not in the sense which made him an eligible husband for either of her granddaughters.
Lesbia was in a pensive mood this evening. She sat in the verandah, looking dreamily at the lake, and at Fairfield yonder, a broad green slope, silvered with moonlight, and seeming to stretch far away into unfathomable distance.
If one could but take one's lover by the hand and go wandering over those mystic moonlit slopes into some new unreal world where it would not matter whether a man were rich or poor, high-born or low-born, where there should be no such things as rank and state to be won or lost! Lesbia felt to-night as if she would like to live out her life in dreamland. Reality was too hard, too much set round by difficulties and sacrifices.