"And now you have thought?"
"Yes," he said, still smiling. "Yes, I have thought—seriously, with my serious friends yonder."
Barbara, as she stood, with her fingers closed on the heavy handle of the door, and her face turned towards Harding, fixed her eyes intently on his.
"I know!" she exclaimed. "You have made up your mind to come back to Mitchelhurst."
"Who knows?" said he. "I'm not sanguine, but we'll see what time and fortune have to say to it. At any rate my people are patient enough—they'll wait for me!"
To the girl, longing for a romance, the idea of the young man's resolution was delightful. She looked at him with a little quivering thrill of impatience, as if she would have had him do something towards the great end that very moment. Her small, uplifted face was flushed, and her eyes were like stars. The brightening light outside shone on the soft brown velvet of her dress, and something in her eager, lightly-poised attitude gave Reynold the impression of a dainty brown-plumaged, bright-eyed bird, ready for instant flight. He almost stretched an instinctive hand to grasp and detain her, lest she should loose her hold of the iron ring and be gone.
"I know you will succeed—you will come back!" she exclaimed. "How long first, I wonder?"
"Shall I succeed?" said Reynold, half to himself, but half-questioning her to win the sweet, unconscious assurance, which meant so little, yet mocked so deep a meaning.
"Yes!" she replied. "You will! You must be master here."
Master! She might have put it in a dozen different ways, and found no word to waken the swift, meaning flash in his eyes which that word did. Her pulses did not quicken, she perfectly understood that he was thinking of Mitchelhurst. She could not understand what mere dead earth and stone Mitchelhurst was to the man at her side.