‘It’s very civil of you towards the parish to say as much,’ said Edward with a veiled sneer, ‘and it is kind of you to shrink from wounding our feelings as aborigines, but I am sure you must have been ineffably bored. There is positively nothing to do at Hazlehurst.’
‘I suppose that’s why the place suits you, Ted?’ observed Miss Clare innocently.
The conversation had an uncomfortable tone which was quite out of harmony with the soft evening sky, and shadowy garden, where the flowers were losing their colour as the light declined. John Treverton looked curiously at the man he knew to be his rival.
He saw a man of about six-and-twenty, of the middle height, slim almost to fragility, yet with a compactness of form which indicated activity and possibly strength. Gray eyes inclining to blue, long lashes, delicately-pencilled eyebrows, a fair complexion, low, narrow brow, and regular features, a pale brown moustache, more silky than abundant, made up a face that was very handsome in the estimation of some people, but which assuredly erred on the side of effeminacy. It was a face that would have suited the velvet and brocade of one of the French Henry’s minions, or the lovelocks and jewel-broidered doublet of one of James Stuart’s silken favourites.
It would have been difficult to imagine the owner of that face doing any good or great work in the world, or leaving any mark upon his time, save some petty episode of vanity, profligacy, and selfishness in the memoirs of a modern St. Simon.
‘Anything new in the evening papers?’ asked Mr. Clare, with a stifled yawn.
The languid inquiry followed upon a silence that had lasted rather too long to be pleasant.
‘Sampson had not got his Globe when I left him,’ answered John Treverton; ‘but in the present stagnation of everything at home and abroad I confess to feeling very little interest in the evening papers.’
‘I should like to have heard if that unlucky dancer is dead,’ said Celia.
John Treverton, who had been standing beside Laura’s chair like a man lost in a waking dream, turned suddenly at this remark.