There was a marked change in his voice, as though he attached some importance to the inquiry: Esther listened, hoping she should hear wit or wisdom.
Dick said it was.
“You know it?” inquired the Admiral.
“I have passed it a hundred times, but that is all,” replied Dick.
“Ah,” said Van Tromp, with a smile, and shaking his head; “you are not an old campaigner; you have the world to learn. Now I, you see, find an inn so very near my own home, and my first thought is—my neighbours. I shall go forward and make my neighbours’ acquaintance; no, you needn’t come; I shall not be a moment.”
And he walked off briskly towards the inn, leaving Dick alone with Esther on the road.
“Dick,” she exclaimed, “I am so glad to get a word with you; I am so happy, I have such a thousand things to say; and I want you to do me a favour. Imagine, he has come without a paint-box, without an easel; and I want him to have all. I want you to get them for me in Thymebury. You saw, this moment, how his heart turned to painting. They can’t live without it,” she added; meaning perhaps Van Tromp and Michelangelo.
Up to that moment she had observed nothing amiss in Dick’s behaviour. She was too happy to be curious; and his silence, in presence of the great and good being whom she called her father, had seemed both natural and praiseworthy. But now that they were alone, she became conscious of a barrier between her lover and herself, and alarm sprang up in her heart.
“Dick,” she cried, “you don’t love me.”
“I do that,” he said heartily.