"Mr. Bramwell is certain to be anxious about the boy, and it would be a great kindness if you would go over the stage and see that all is well."
"I! what? Do you mean in the dark?" she said, looking at him in astonishment.
"Well, Miss Layard, I thought you had more courage than to be afraid of a little darkness; but if you did feel anything like timidity, rather than that Mr. Bramwell should remain uneasy, I would go with you and show you the way. What do you say to that?"
She said nothing, but, bending her head over her stitching, blushed until her bent neck grew pink under her golden-brown hair.
He did not insist upon an answer. Apparently he felt satisfied. In a moment the door opened, and Layard and Bramwell came in.
Although the lamp-light in the room was not particularly strong, for a moment Bramwell was dazzled and confused. He had not been in so bright a room since his retirement from the world. Although the furniture was faded and infirm, it was splendid compared with that in his cottage. Then there were a few prints upon the walls in gilt frames, and curtains to the window, and pieces of china and an ornamental clock on the chimney-piece, and a square of carpet in the middle of the floor, and a bright cover on the table, not one thing of the like being on Boland's Ait.
There was, too, an atmosphere of humanity about the place which did not find its way to the island; here was a sense of human interest, human contact, human sympathy wholly wanting in his home. Bramwell had come from the cell of an anchorite to a festival of man.
But above all else and before all else was the tall, lithe, bright-faced, blooming girl, with plenteous hair and blue eyes, in which there were glints of gold, and the ready smile and white teeth that showed between her moist red lips when she spoke. This was the first lady Bramwell had spoken to or met since his exile from the world, and she was beautiful enough for a goddess--a Hebe.
Was this, he asked himself, the dream of a captive, and should he wake to find himself once more mured between his white washed walls, environed by silence and bound by the hideous fetters of a bond which was a horror and a disgrace? Should he wake up as he had awakened every morning for three years, to think of his ruined home, his blighted life, and his wife, who, though living, was dead for ever to him, and yet with her dead and infamous hand held him back from taking a new companion, to be to him what he had hoped she would be when he took her in all love and faith?
No--all this was true. The talk and the laughter were true. His own talk and laughter were true; and, above all, this radiant girl, with her quick wit and beautiful intelligence and sympathy, was true. All true--and he was no more than thirty years of age! A young man. A man no older than the youngest girl might marry. Philip had told him that this girl was twenty. Why, twenty and thirty were just the ages for bride and bridegroom!