“I knew your aunt well in my boyhood. She was a friend of my mother’s, and Lodge Delight is little short of fairy-land. You have Miss Dawn as a guest?”
“Yes, for a long time, I hope. Her father is in California.”
Fred Foster came up, beaming with joy and pride.
“Madame Ray, the gods have surely favored me. Have you been hiding at Weir Park all this time while I have roamed up and down the world in weary search for you?”
She answered with careless badinage, and Arthur moved away from them to Cinthia, who stood apart outside the door with a cloud on her bonny face.
In hoarse, indistinct accents, he murmured:
“Miss Dawn, will you permit me the favor of a few words with you? We can walk along this rose-alley, and the others will follow presently.”
She bowed silently, and moved on by his side between the rows of blossoming rose-trees that, neglected and untrimmed, threw out long briery arms across the weed-grown path, obliging Arthur now and then to stoop and hold them aside from contact with her rustling silken gown.
For a few moments they were quite silent—dangerously silent for two who had not quite unlearned “the sweet, sweet lesson of loving;” for in this charmed spot, that held the echo of lovers’ vows, beneath that blue and sunny sky, with the zephyrs wooing the flowers, were a hundred temptations to go back to the old days and the old love, whose summer had been so brief, whose winter so dark and endless.
They both felt it subtly, painfully. Their beautiful faces were pale with secret anguish, their lips trembled with emotion, tears hid beneath the drooping lids of the eyes they dared not raise to each other.