It was only her profile he could see; but he saw that she was looking ill, worse than she had looked when they parted at Ventnor. The sight of the pale face, with a troubled look about the mouth, touched him keenly. Just in that moment he forgot that there was such a being as George Fairfax upon this earth; forgot the sin that his wife had sinned against him; longed to clasp her to his breast; was only deterred by a kind of awkward shyness—to which such strong men as he are sometimes liable—from so doing.
"I am sorry to see that you are not looking very well," he said at last, with supreme stiffness, and with that peculiarly unconciliating air which an Englishman is apt to put on, when he is languishing to hold out the olive-branch.
"I have not been very well; but I daresay I shall soon be better, now we are going to travel."
"Going to travel!"
"Yes, papa has made up his mind to move at last. We go to Cologne to-morrow. I thought they would have told you that at the house."
"No; I only waited to ask where you—where the boy was to be found. I did not even stop to see your father."
After this there came a dead silence—a silence that lasted for about five minutes, during which they heard the faint rustle of the pine branches stirred ever so lightly by the evening wind. The boy slept on, unconscious and serene; the mother watching him, and Daniel Granger contemplating both from under the shadow of his eyebrows.
The silence grew almost oppressive at last, and Mr. Granger was the first to break it.
"You do not ask me for any news of Arden," he said.
Clarissa blushed, and glanced at him with a little wounded look. It was hard to be reminded of the paradise from which she had been exiled.