“Blame me not that I bid you go, Everell!” she replied, as if not to be reassured. “You may come to blame me that I ever stayed to hear you!”
“For that dear fault my heart will thank you while it moves.”
“It was a fault!—I see now that it was. I was so solitary, so rebellious against my uncle and his company, that when you came my heart seemed to know you as a friend; and I listened to you.”
“Ay, sweet listener that you were! What effect your listening had upon me! I had wished to return to France, which in exile I had grown up to love. This England, though I was born in it, was to me a strange country, but you have made it home!”
He raised both her hands to his lips, while she stood irresolute, her eyes searching his face for the secret of his confidence, which she would have rejoiced to think better warranted than her fears. The silence was suddenly broken by a slight, brief noise in the greenery near the steps.
“What’s that?” she said, quickly.
“The wind,” replied Everell; but the sudden straightening of his body, and fixity of his attention upon the place of the sound, betrayed his doubt.
“No,” whispered Georgiana, “’twas quite different.”
“Some animal moving among the shrubs,” said Everell. “I’ll go and see.”
With his hand upon his sword-hilt, he walked to the shrubbery growing along the foot of the bank which rose to the terrace. “’Twas hereabouts,” he said, and, drawing his weapon, thrust it downward into the thick leafy mass. From the further side of the mass came the loud hoot of an owl, followed by the noise of a man scrambling to his feet.