“He has her down! He is drinking her life-blood!” he thought; and for an instant the pulsations of his heart stood still, nor did they resume their wonted beat even after he saw the attitude of Marian Grey, and his terrible watch dog, Bruno.
“Marian!” he began, for he could not be formal then. “Marian! leave him, I entreat you. He is cruelly savage with strangers.”
“But I have tamed him, you see,” she answered, winding her arms still closer around his neck, while he licked again her face and hair.
Wonderingly Frederic looked on, and all the while there came to him no thought that the two had met before—that the hand patting so fondly Bruno’s head had fed him many a time—and that amid all the changes which six years had made, the sagacious, animal had recognized his mistress and playmate, Marian Lindsey.
“It must be that you can win all hearts,” he said, watching her admiringly, and marvelling at her secret power.
Shaking back her sunny curls, and glancing upward into his face Marian answered involuntarily:
“No, not all. There is one I would have given worlds to win, but it cast me off, just when I needed comfort the most.”
She spoke impulsively, and as she spoke there arose within her the wish that he, like Bruno, might know her then and there. But he did not. He only remembered what Will Gordon had said of her hopeless attachment and her apparent confession of the same to him, smote heavily upon his heart, though why he, a married man, should care he could not tell. He didn’t really care, he thought; he only pitied her, and by way of encouragement he said, “Even that may yet be won;” and while he said it, there came over him a sensation of dreariness, as if the winning of that heart would necessarily take from him something which was becoming more and more essential to his happiness.
Their conversation was here interrupted by Josh, who was Bruno’s keeper, and had come to chain him for the day. Marian knew him at once, though he had changed from the short, thick lad of twelve to the taller youth of seventeen; and when, as he saw her position with Bruno, he exclaimed, “Goo-goo-good Lord!” she turned her beaming face toward him and answered laughingly, “I have a secret for charming dogs.”
Involuntarily Josh’s old cloth cap came off, while over his countenance there flitted an expression as if that voice were not entirely strange to him. Touching his master’s arm, and pointing to the kneeling maiden, he stammered out: