“Very well. Her Majesty appeared in a most gracious mood, and the Prince looked splendidly handsome.”
“As you do to-day—you are the true Queen of the drawing-room.” Then, in a lower voice—“Oh, Evelyn, let us hasten from this place. I cannot hear that another than myself should even see you, now that our time together is so short.”
“We shall meet again ere long I trust,” she replied.
“With what coolness and indifference you speak of our parting. Ah, it was not so when at Woodlands you—”
Evelyn’s cheek flushed, and her eyes took a displeased expression.
“How selfish you men are! You well know that I am not going abroad for my own pleasure, but that I am ordered to Italy to recruit my health.—Why, then, blame me for that which is inevitable?”
“Blame you, Evelyn?” and the young heart throbbed, and the earnest eyes filled with a sorrowful indignation.
The two walked on in silence—and never did mortal pair, since the days of our first parents, appear outwardly more suited to each other.
Evelyn is still all that we have painted her in early life—though the varying blush of girlhood has given place to the fresh bloom of matured womanhood, and the figure once slight to a fault has acquired that voluptuous roundness, united with grace peculiar to the women of Andalusia—for Evelyn’s mother was of Spanish extraction. Col. Melville is the perfect type of an aristocratic Englishman—tall and muscular, yet slight; of a noble military bearing, and a face whose faultless regularity of feature might rival even with that of his fair companion; hair of a light brown, curling naturally like the locks of “the god of the etherial bow;” whiskers of the same shade; deep-set eyes, where sincerity sat enthroned—and a countenance expressive of goodness and feeling, still flushed with the glow of youth.
Such is the description of the cavalier, leaning on whose manly arm, our heroine threaded her way through the crowded reception rooms of the Palace of St. James.