CHAPTER XV.
"But as we walked we turned aside Into a narrow tortuous lane Where baffling paths the roads divide And jealous brambles prick to pain: Then first I saw, with quick surprise, The strange new look in friendship's eyes.
"And now, in one stupendous dream, We wander through the purple glades, Which love has tinted with the gleam Of wonderful, enchanting shades: But I—would give it all away For those dear hours of friendship's day."
Eleanor Esher.
Mrs. Rebell had now been at Fletchings five days. It was Saturday night—in three days more she would be back at Chancton.
Standing before her dressing-table, she found herself counting the last hours of a holiday which had proved more enchanting than she had thought possible. How sorry she would be to leave the curious pretty room in which she found herself! This room, and that next door now turned into a dressing-room, had been fitted up when the wonders of China were first becoming known to the Western world. It was instinct with the strange charm so often found in those old English country houses where Christendom and Goblindom fight for mastery.
The greatest poet of his time had spent at Fletchings the honeymoon which formed a beginning to the most disastrous of marriage tragedies; and Septimus Daman, now Barbara's fellow guest, had managed to convey to her his belief that the rooms which she now occupied had been those set aside for the hapless pair. Was it here, so Barbara wondered—here, or perhaps sitting at the lacquer table in the dressing-room—that the bride had written the formal, yet wholly contented, letter to her parents, with its concluding sentence: "I cannot tell you any more for Lord Byron is looking over my shoulder!"—playful, intimate words, written by the proud, headstrong girl who was to lead a later life of such harsh bitterness.
Barbara felt a vague retrospective pity for the long-dead writer of these words. How far superior is friendship to what people call love! Every day she was proving the truth of this, her own, and—yes, her friend's—discovery.