“Very well, then; to-morrow morning at ten o’clock we shall all be ready.”
“She must be extremely sweet-tempered,” thought Godfrey, when Arthur, having shown him to his hotel, had left him alone for the night.
“I am afraid I was rather rough to her. Her little assumption of independence was really only touching, poor child,” he went on to reflect, little dreaming, deluded man, of what was before him! “And Nina is very pretty and very attractive—I don’t wonder at Dexter—though she is not to be compared with Lettice for real beauty of feature and expression.”
Few words passed between the sisters after their guest had left them. When Arthur came in he found Lettice sitting alone. Nina had gone to bed, and she too was tired and meant to follow her at once.
“And don’t you like him?” Arthur could not help saying, as he kissed his sister for good night.
“Like him—whom?” said Lettice, as if awaking from a brown study. “Mr Auriol? Oh yes, I like him very well. He is much what I expected;” and Arthur said no more.
Notwithstanding his long journey of the preceding days, Mr Auriol was awake and up betimes the following morning. It was several years since he had been out of his own country, and the sights and sounds about him struck him almost as freshly as if he saw and heard them for the first time. The early morning sunshine was softer and less monotonous than the midday effulgence which Lettice had complained of, and seemed to add vividness without glare to every detail of the picturesque scene on which his windows looked out. For it was market-day at Esparto, and the border-land town was a meeting-place for the denizens of many widely varying districts.
There were the country people from the near neighbourhood. The women, plain-looking save for their brilliant eyes, weather-beaten and prematurely aged through hard work and exposure, their brown leather-like skin showing harder and browner from the contrast with the light-coloured silk kerchiefs skilfully knotted round their heads, yet as a rule seemingly contented and cheerful enough as they chattered and chaffered round the great ancient fountain, the centre of the “Place.” The men, far less numerous and far less energetic, handsome fellows many of them, though less so than the gaudily attired Spanish mountaineers lured to Esparto by the work sometimes to be had there in plenty, while yet looking as if labour or exertion of any kind was completely beneath their lordly selves. And here and there, recognisable at once by those acquainted with their peculiar type, Basques, descendants of that mysterious race whose origin and language have so long puzzled the learned in such subjects. Nor were there wanting specimens of still more remote nationalities. Two or three negro servants were bargaining and purchasing for their masters; and some little fair-haired English children, who had coaxed their maids to get up extra early before it was hot, to see the fun and bustle in the market-place; while a Russian nurse, gorgeous in scarlet and gold embroidery, indolently surveyed the scene from a balcony opposite.
It was picturesque in the extreme, and amusing. But after a while, staring out of the window being a diversion he most rarely indulged in, Mr Auriol tired of it, and after his modest breakfast of coffee and a roll, finding it was barely nine o’clock, he strolled out for a walk, though his ideas were of the vaguest as to what direction he should take.
“I have nearly an hour before they will expect me at the Villa Martine,” he said to himself. “I have no wish to rub Mistress Lettice the wrong way by turning up too soon. It strikes me she would look upon that as almost worse than being too late. Where shall I go?”