"I think you are glad to see me, Sarah."
One flash of answering avowal, and then the lovely consciousness on the face faded, the light of love died out of it; it grew hard, satirical, half angry. That she should so have betrayed herself! She raised her head, and looked out straight before her from the depths of her cold light-blue eyes.
"We are glad to see any one in this lonely desert, where the only gentleman of degree is Mr. St. John. Not but that I would rather see him than many others. Did you leave London this morning?"
Frederick St. John dropped the hand and rose.
"I shall never understand you, Sarah. Yes, I left it this morning. Where's Georgina? She will be glad to welcome me, if you are not."
"There's one will be glad to welcome you at Castle Wafer," she rejoined, laughing now, but the laugh sounded cold and cheerless. "Lady Anne has been wishing for you for some time."
"Yes, I think she has. I must go on now. I shall see you again, no doubt, by-and-by."
He hastened on his way, utterly unconscious that a pair of eyes, more lovely than those he had been gazing on, behind the grove of trees, had been unintentional witnesses to the interview. Georgina Beauclerc had been strolling about when she saw his approach through the trees. She was the dean's daughter--a lithe, active girl of middle height with a pleasing, piquant, rather saucy face, these wide-open grey-blue eyes, light-brown hair, and a healthy blood mantling under the sunburnt skin of the dimpled cheeks--a daring, wild, independent young lady, but one all truth and ingenuousness; and that is saying a very great deal in these days of most detestable artificially. Georgina had no end of faults, but Dr. Beauclerc knew her heart, and he would not have exchanged his daughter for any girl in the world.
She, Georgina Beauclerc, had looked on from between the trees, all her veins throbbing, her pulses beating. A stronger, a purer, a more enduring love never made glad the heart of woman, than this one that filled Georgina Beauclerc's for Frederick St. John. To hear his step was rapture; to touch his hand was as a ray of that unforgiven fire "filched for us from heaven;" to see him thus unexpectedly was as if the whole earth had become suddenly flooded with a brilliant, rose-coloured light. But, even as she watched that other meeting with her cousin, the sharp pain--often enough felt there before--seized her heart, the loving light faded from her face, and her lips paled with anguish. Of keen, discerning faculties, she had seen all along that it was not from Lady Anne danger was to be feared, but from Sarah herself. A faint, low cry, as of a bird in pain, escaped her as she watched the meeting, and drank in its signs.
Did anything in the world ever run so crookedly as this course of love? Every one--uncles, aunts, guardians--wanted Frederick St. John to wed Lady Anne. Frederick did not want to marry her at all; did not intend to marry her; and she, on her part, hoped to marry some one else. But that was a secret not yet to be breathed to the world; Frederick alone shared it; and if things came to a crisis he intended to take on himself the whole onus of declining the match, and so spare Anne. They understood each other perfectly; and that is more than can be said for any other two actors in our story. Nothing so very crooked there, you will say; but look a little further. Georgina loved Frederick St. John with her whole heart; and he never gave a thought to her. He must have known of her love; there had been things to reveal it to him--trifles in the past; but he passed her by, and felt all too inclined to give his love to her cousin. She, Sarah, could have made him her heart's resting-place, ah! how willingly! but her head was filled ever with Lady Anne, and she met his incipient love with scorn. It was curing him, as I have told you; but if the whole truth could have been laid bare, the lives of some of them would have been widely different.