"Handsome fellow!" he thought, as he watched him from the window; "and sits his horse uncommonly well. Why doesn't that girl fly to meet him? They used to in my days."
But Newbury dismounted with only a footman to receive him, and Marcia did not appear till the gong had rung for luncheon.
Sir Wilfrid's social powers were severely taxed to keep that meal going. Lady Coryston sat almost entirely silent and ate nothing. Marcia too ate little and talked less. Newbury indeed had arrived in radiant spirits, bringing a flamboyant account of Marcia's trousseau which he had extracted from a weekly paper, and prepared to tease her thereon. But he could scarcely get the smallest rise out of her, and presently he, too, fell silent, throwing uneasy glances at her from time to time. Her black hair and eyes were more than usually striking, by contrast with a very simple and unadorned white dress; but for beauty, her face required animation; it could be all but plain in moments of languor or abstraction; and Sir Wilfrid marveled that a girl's secret instinct did not save her from presenting herself so unattractively to her lover.
Newbury, it appeared, had spent the preceding night in what Sir Wilfrid obstinately called a "monkery"—alias the house of an Anglican brotherhood or Community—the Community of the Ascension, of which Newbury's great friend, Father Brierly, was Superior. In requital for Newbury's teasing of Marcia, Sir Wilfrid would have liked to tease Newbury a little on the subject of the "monkery." But Newbury most dexterously evaded him. He would laugh, but not at the hosts he had just quitted; and through all his bantering good temper there could be felt the throb of some deep feeling which was not allowed to express itself. "Damned queer eyes!" was Bury's inward comment, as he happened once to observe Newbury's face during a pause of silence. "Half in a dream all the time—even when the fellow's looking at his sweetheart."
After luncheon Marcia made a sign, and she and Newbury slipped away. They wandered out beyond the lake into a big wood, where great pools of pink willow-herb, in its open spaces, caught the light as it struck through the gray trunks of the beeches. Newbury found a seat for Marcia on a fallen trunk, and threw himself beside her. The world seemed to have been all washed by the thunder-storm of the night before; the odors of grass, earth, and fern were steaming out into the summer air. The wood was alive with the hum of innumerable insects, which had become audible and dominant with the gradual silencing of the birds. In the half-cut hay-fields the machines stood at rest; rarely, an interlaced couple could be dimly seen for a moment on some distant footpath of the park; sometimes a partridge called or a jay screamed; otherwise a Sabbath stillness—as it seemed to Marcia, a Sabbath dreariness—held the scene.
Newbury put up his arms, drew her down to him, and kissed her passionately. She yielded; but it was more yielding than response; and again he was conscious of misgiving as at luncheon.
"Darling!—is there anything wrong—anything that troubles you?" he said, anxiously. "Do you think I've forgotten you for one moment, while I've been away?"
"Yes; while you were asleep." She smiled shyly, while her fingers caressed his.
"Wrong—quite wrong! I dreamed of you both nights. And oh, dearest, I thought of you last night."
"Where—when?" Her voice was low—a little embarrassed.