After he had gone, Felicia, who was the most indiscreet of match-makers, began one of her extravagant eulogiums. 'Like him!' she cried, in reply to Maud's inquiry; 'like is not the word. He is the best, noblest, bravest, and most chivalrous of beings.'
'Not the handsomest!' interrupted Maud, tempted by Felicia's enthusiasm into feeling perversely indifferent.
'Yes, and the handsomest too,' Felicia said; 'tall, strong, with beautiful features, and eyes as soft and tender as a woman's; indeed a great deal softer than most women's.'
'Then,' objected Maud, 'why has he never' ——
'Because,' answered her companion, indignantly anticipating the objection, 'there is no one half-a-quarter good enough for him.'
'Well,' said the other, by this time quite in a rebellious mood, 'all I can say is, that I don't think him in the least good-looking. I don't like that great scar across his forehead.'
'Don't you?' cried Felicia; and then she told her how the scar had come there, and Maud could no longer pretend not to be interested.
The next day Sutton came with them for a drive, and Maud, who had by this time shaken off her fears, began to find him decidedly interesting. There was something extremely romantic in having a soldier, whose reputation was already almost historical, the hero of a dozen brilliant episodes, coming tame about the house, only too happy to do her bidding or Felicia's, and apparently perfectly contented with their society. Felicia was in the highest spirits, for she found her pet project shaping itself with pleasant facility into a fair prospect of realisation; and when Felicia was in high spirits they infected all about her.
Sutton, innocently unconscious of the cause of her satisfaction, but realising only that she wanted Maud amused and befriended, lent himself with a ready zeal to further her wishes and let no leisure afternoon go by without suggesting some new scheme of pleasure. Maud's quick, impulsive, highly-strung temperament, her moods of joyousness or depression, hardly less transient than the shadows that flit across the fields in April, her keen appreciation of beauty and pathos, made her, child as she was in most of her thoughts and ways, an interesting companion to him. Her eagerness in enjoyment was a luxury to see; and Sutton, a good observer, knew before long, almost better than herself, what things she most enjoyed. Instead of the reluctant and unsympathetic permission which her late instructress had accorded to her poetical tastes, Sutton and Felicia completely understood what she felt, treated her taste on each occasion with a flattering consideration, and led her continually to 'fresh woods and pastures new,' where vistas of loveliness, fairer far than any she had yet discovered, seemed to break upon her.
Vernon's library, his one extravagance, was all that the most fastidious scholar could desire; any choice edition of a favourite poet was on his table almost before his English friends had got it. A beautiful book, like a beautiful woman, deserves the best attire that art can give it, and Maud felt a thrill of satisfaction at all the finery of gilt and Russian leather in which she could now behold her well-beloved poems arrayed. Sutton told her, with a decisiveness which carried conviction, what things she would like and what she might neglect; and she soon followed his directions with unquestioning faith. He used to come and read to them sometimes, in a sweet, impressive manner, Maud felt; and the passage, as he had read it, lived on in her thoughts with the precise shade of feeling which his voice had given it.