The Earl had not come down when he entered the famous breakfast-room, and, not a little to his satisfaction, he found himself alone with Lady Evelyn for the first time since his arrival at the Manor. A student of faces always, he studied this face to-day with a curiosity which he set down to his own delusions rather than to an absolute interest in the personality of a stranger. A beautiful woman he had admitted her to be when first he saw her by her father's side upon the night which carried him to the Hall. But now his scrutiny went deeper, and, so far as opportunity served, he looked at her as one seeking a woman's secret, and seeking it with a man's desire to help her.
And first he said that it was an English face in repose, and yet not an English face when the repose was lost. The masses of jet black hair would have excited no surprise upon the Corso at Rome or shining in an aureole cast out from a Florentine window. Here, in England, the tresses spoke of the South and its suns—and yet, in flat contradiction, the perfect skin, smooth and silky as the leaf of a pink white rose, could tell of English lanes and sunless days and the kinder climate of the North. Character he read in the firm contour of her chin—romance and passion in the deep blue of her eyes and the modulations of a voice whose music had not been lost in the roaring Saturnalia of the modern salon. That he himself had so far failed to attract her notice was a fact which neither wounded his vanity nor abated his interest. It had been the first maxim of his life to hasten slowly, and to no pursuit was this maxim more necessary than to that of friendship.
This, then, was the estimate which one strong personality formed of another; the man saying to himself, "I would read this woman's heart!" the woman asking herself if she must talk architecture until the Earl came to her assistance. Breaking the ice with a common observation, she remarked that she had seen him galloping across the park and regretted the dilatory habit which kept her in bed.
"Getting up is a foreign art," she said. "It lives in kitchens and places where they scrub. The doctors positively forbid it nowadays. And, of course, life is too short to disobey the doctors."
Gavin looked at her with the air of a man who has too much common sense to deal in frivolities and rarely troubled to say the thing which was not.
"They talk nonsense," he said quietly; "the profession is becoming far too commercial. It lives and thrives upon the credulity of fools. Just consider—man is the only animal which does not glory in the Creator's gift, the dawning day and all its wonders. For what do we change it! For the electric light and the champagne which disagrees with us? We borrow of the night and then grumble because we have nothing to offer the day. If men could get up at five o'clock and go to bed at ten, they would begin to understand the realities of living."
Evelyn, much amused at his earnestness and quite understanding that some pleasant originality of character dictated the outburst, looked at him a little mischievously from beneath her long lashes while she said:
"In winter—surely not five o'clock then, Mr. Ord?"
"Not at all," was the quick reply; "we are expected to use our common sense in the matter. A winter's dawn is distinctly unpleasant; have nothing to do with it. A true benefactor of mankind would help us to hibernate. Imagine how splendid it would be to sleep from the twenty-sixth day of December until the first day of April. Those are the months of the income tax—of no interest to you, Lady Evelyn, but of great importance to poor people who are unable to help the Government to throw hay into the sea from the shores of South Africa. Blot out the winter, by all means; but leave us the summer, and do not expect us to spend the best hours of it in bed."
"Am I, then, personally guilty in the matter? Frankly, you will never convert me. I am hateful before ten o'clock, and if I go riding before that time, the very horses tremble. Consider what going to bed at ten o'clock would mean to us in the season?"