He smiled back, and half-closing his eyes, lay looking at her as she took a chair at the other end of the room, and busied herself with a bit of fancy work.
"How pretty she is," he thought, vaguely, and when he fell into a fitful slumber, her fair face blent with Grace's in his dreams, and bewildered him with its bright, enchanting beauty.
[CHAPTER VIII.]
"BUT AS FOR HER, SHE STAID AT HOME."
To aid thy mind's development, to watch
The dawn of little joys, to sit and see
Almost thy very growth, to view thee catch
Knowledge of objects, wonders yet to see!
To hold thee lightly on a gentle knee,
And print on thy soft cheek a parent's kiss.
—Byron's Childe Harold.
To Bruce Conway the months of slow and tardy convalescence seemed like dead weights on his impatient, restless soul; to Grace Winans, in her splendid but strangely silent home, where but few guests were received, and which she rarely left, time passed as it did to Mariana in the Moated Grange. But for all that, the summer passed like a painful dream, and the "melancholy days" had come; "time does not stop for tears."
Mrs. Conway had prevailed on Bruce to compromise his intention of going abroad again by spending the winter with her amid the gayeties of Washington—the "Paris of America."
How far a pretty face had influenced him in making this decision it is impossible to say; but Mrs. Conway, in her gratitude to the Clendenons for their kindness to her idol, had fairly worried them into consenting to let Lulu pass the winter with her in the gay capital city. For Lulu it may be said that no persuasion was needed to obtain her consent, and how far her fancy for a handsome face had influenced her, we will not undertake to say either. However this may be, the Washington newspapers duly chronicled for the benefit of fashionable society the interesting intelligence that the elegant Mr. Bruce Conway, the hero of the much talked of Norfolk duel, and his still brilliant aunt, Mrs. Conway—both so well known in Washington circles—had taken a handsome suite of rooms at Willard's Hotel for the winter. And the newspapers—which will flatter any woman in society, be she fair or homely—added the information that Mrs. Conway had one of the belles of Norfolk for her guest—the lovely Miss C.—concluding with the stereotyped compliment that her marvelous beauty and varied accomplishments would create a stir in fashionable society; and thus was Lulu Clendenon launched on the sea of social dissipation.