There could be nothing in the notion, yet she probed her own feelings. Certainly she liked Lord Audley. If he was not handsome, he had that air of strength and power which impresses women; and he had ease and charm, and the look of fashion which has its weight with even the most sensible of her sex. He had all these and he was a man, and she admired him and was grateful to him. And yesterday she might have thought that her feeling for him was love.
But this morning she had gained a higher notion of love. She had learned from Etruria how near to that pattern of love which Mr. Colet preached the love of man and woman could rise. She had a new conception of its strength and its power to expel what was selfish or petty. She had seen it in its noblest form in Etruria, and she knew that her feeling for Lord Audley was not in the same world with Etruria’s feeling for the curate. She laughed at the notion.
“Poor Etruria!” she meditated. “Or should it be, happy Etruria? Who knows? I only know that I am heart-whole!”
And she knotted up her hair and, Diana-like, went out into the pure biting air of the morning, along the green rides hoary with dew and fringed with bracken, under the oak trees from which the wood-pigeons broke in startled flight.
But if the energy of her thoughts carried her out, fatigue soon brought her to a pause. The evening’s excitement, the strain of the adventure had not left her, young as she was, unscathed. The springs of enthusiasm waned with her strength, and presently she felt jaded. She perceived that she would have done better had she rested longer; and too late the charms of bed appealed to her.
She was at the breakfast table when Basset—he, too, had had a restless night and many thoughts—came down. He saw that she was pale and that there were shadows under her eyes, and the man’s tenderness went out to her. He longed, he longed above everything to put himself right with her; and on the impulse of the moment, “I want you to know,” he said, standing meekly at her elbow, “that I am sorry I lost my temper last evening.”
But she was out of sympathy with him. “It is nothing,” she said. “We were all tired, I think. Etruria is not down yet.”
“But I want to ask your——”
“Oh dear, dear!” she cried, interrupting him with a gesture of impatience. “Don’t let us rake it up again. If my uncle has not suffered, there is no harm done. Please let it rest.”
But he could not let it rest. He longed to put his neck under her foot, and he did not see that she was in the worst possible mood for his purpose. “Still,” he said, “you must let me say——”