“Paid, sir—all paid, sir! Mr. Wilton is free to leave here when he will, sir!” exclaimed Nathan Gomer, with the old grin upon his features.
CHAPTER XI.—SHADOWS.
Oh, love! of whom great Caesar was the suitor,
Titus the master, Antony the slave,
Horace, Catullus, scholars, Ovid tutor,
Sappho, the sage blue-stocking, in whose grave
All those may leap who rather would be neuter—
(Leucadia’s rock still overlooks the wave),
Oh, love! thou art the very god of evil,
For, after all, we cannot call thee devil.
—Byron.
Helen Grahame sat in her dressing-room alone. Scarce half-an-hour had elapsed since she had quitted the side of Lester Vane, after their stroll in the garden.
Her handkerchief, which she had dropped during her interview with Hugh Riversdale in the thicket, yet glared before her eyes as it had done when presented by him who, with a sharp, penetrating gaze, had sought to extract evidence out of her confusion to assure him that she was the heroine of the stolen interview he had disturbed.
She yet saw it floating and whirling among the circling eddies of the meandering waters, which ran past her feet, and drew such small consolation from the possibility of its never being again recovered—at least to her disadvantage—as it might afford her.
It was something to have destroyed the only evidence that could identify her with that stolen meeting, which had been the cause of so much mystification, excitement, and scandal among the household. She could scarcely prevent a proud smile of triumph curling her small upper lip when she reflected that the mastery she possessed over the play of her features, when she brought her will into action, had enabled her to baffle the scrutiny of Vane, which she felt instinctively was exerted to enable him to obtain power over her. Her womanly instincts were too acute, too keen, for her not to comprehend that.
It is true she had no notion that he intended to act basely or falsely to her. In spite of his display, his assumption of wealth, and the inferences he left to be drawn from his suggestions, she entertained a conviction that his sources of income were far more limited in capacity than he wished them to appear. Her father’s reputed affluence—of the reality of which she in common with the other members of the family, had no doubt—she could easily understand, would attract the attention of a young man of high family, who had but little with which to support his station, and she as readily comprehended that he would do his best to secure the hand of the eldest daughter of a man of wealth, if with it he ensured also the certainty of a handsome settlement, to say nothing of the unquestionable charms of the “encumbrance” he would have to take with the gold.