"But it interests me greatly," she pleaded, with that insistence which often attends the discussion of things better avoided. "If I am really so like somebody else, ought I not to be curious? You say——"
"Indeed, I say nothing," he exclaimed quickly, and then in a lower voice—"at least until the Earl has breakfasted."
She did not reply. The Earl entered the room and began at once to speak of Gavin's work and the arrangements which must be made for it.
CHAPTER XIX
FROM THE BELFRY TOWER
Gavin's little band of workmen ran up a light scaffold of ladders and boards for him against the belfry tower, and had it finished upon the morning of the conversation with the Lady Evelyn. To this height he climbed early in the day, when began an examination of the decaying fabric and set down the first lines of the report he had to make to the Earl. The old building was in a shocking state certainly; the plumb-line declared surprising departures from that stately grace of perpendicularity the text-books had taught him to esteem. Gavin should have taken the greatest interest in all this, but he did not. Had you spoken to him yesterday, he would have been ready to declare that nothing on earth could be more fascinating than the very task he now pretended to be engaged upon; but his habitual candor came to his rescue to-day and he now pronounced the work to be almost distasteful. For, in truth, he had discovered a secret as old as man, and the delight of that new knowledge surpassed the worker's dreams by far.
He stood upon a dizzy height, but custom had staled the peril of his employment, and, in this aspect, fear was unknown to him. A high trembling ladder permitted him to climb up to a couple of boards suspended from the parapet above by frail ropes cunningly wound about the embrasures of the battlements. He stood with his back to a mossy wall; beneath him lay the fair domain of Melbourne Hall; its ancient trees so many children's fretted toys; its grass lands supremely green; pool and lake and river ablaze with the golden light of an Autumn sun. But more to Gavin than these was the figure of the Lady Evelyn herself, clearly to be seen in the glade where the gypsies had pitched their camp—the figure of an English girl divinely tall, of one whom the splendid woods might well choose for their divinity.
She rode through the glade and by her side their walked a rough fellow, who, Gavin thought, would have been much better in Derby jail than idling in the home park at Melbourne. Some chance observations which had fallen from servants' lips had made him acquainted with the circumstances under which these apparent vagrants had come to Derbyshire; and he was quick enough to perceive the connection between the Earl's younger days and this odd visitation.
"He knew these fellows in Roumania and they have come here to blackmail him," was the unspoken comment. "Their master is a shady Roumanian Count—one of the long-haired brand, who ogle the women. I take it that she had promised to marry this man, not altogether at her father's bidding, but just because he is romantic liar enough to appeal to one side of her imagination. That's what sent her to London play-acting. She had to escape from this monotony or it would have killed her. Well, I think I know the temperament—a very dangerous temperament which has sent many a woman the wrong way and will send many more before the world is done with."