The little time-piece over the fireplace struck the hour—ten o’clock. As she spoke Geneviève started.
“It is late,” she thought, “and I must this morning go round the long way by the lodge.”
She hastily put on her jacket and hat, though not so hastily as to omit a moment’s glance into the looking-glass as she did so.
“How pale I look!” she said to herself; “it is with having sat up so late. I am not pretty when I look so pale. Voyons—ce nœud rose—ah! oui, c’est mieux,” and with a somewhat better satisfied contemplation of herself, she turned away from the dressing table and left the room.
Half an hour later she was at the entrance to the Lingthurst woods—a point, which had she been able to leave the Greystone grounds by the door in the wall, she would have reached in less than half the time. She hurried along as fast as possible till almost within sight of the deserted water mill. There, seated on the remains of what had once been a mill-wheel, long ago, in the days when the little stream, now diverted from its original course for other purposes, had come rushing down with incessant chatter and bustle, Geneviève descried the figure she had been straining her eyes to see. It was Trevor Fawcett.
He was sitting perfectly still; he seemed to be thinking deeply. There was considerable suggestion of melancholy in the place itself. The melancholy of the past, though only the past of a water mill,—the dried-up desertedness of the empty little river-bed carried even the least vivid imagination back to a time of brighter days when the brook and the mill had been in their glory, and forwards—further still—to the universal, inevitable future of decay, the “sic transit” branded even on the everlasting hills themselves.
Mr. Fawcett’s imagination was not exceptionally vivid, nor was he much given to reflections of a depressing nature; it was new to Geneviève to see him anything but alert and cheerful, and a momentary sensation of uneasiness made her heart beat quickly.
“Mr. Fawcett,” she said timidly, for she was quite close to him before he saw her, “Mr. Fawcett.”
He looked round quickly and started to his feet.
“I beg your pardon,” he exclaimed. “I did not hear you. I must have been in a brown study. How late you are this morning! I fancied you would not be coming out.”