As they drove quietly back again to Eglosilyan, Mabyn had taken her former place by the driver, and found him uncommonly thoughtful. He answered her questions, but that was all; and it was so unusual to find Harry Trelyon in this mood that she said to him, "Mr. Trelyon, have you been seeing ghosts, too?"
He turned to her and said, "I was thinking about something. Look here, Mabyn: did you ever know any one, or do you know any one, whose face is a sort of barometer to you? Suppose that you see her look pale and tired or sad in any way, then down go your spirits, and you almost wish you had never been born. When you see her face brighten up and get full of healthy color, you feel glad enough to burst out singing or go mad: anyhow, you know that everything's all right. What the weather is, what people may say about you, whatever else may happen to you, that's nothing: all you want to see is just that one person's face look perfectly bright and perfectly happy, and nothing can touch you then. Did you ever know anybody like that?" he added rather abruptly.
"Oh yes," said Mabyn, in a low voice: "that is when you are in love with some one. And there is only one face in all the world that I look to for all these things, there is only one person I know who tells you openly and simply in her face all that affects her, and that is our Wenna. I suppose you have noticed that, Mr. Trelyon?"
But he did not make any answer.
CHAPTER XXI.
CONFESSION.
The lad lay dreaming in the warm meadows by the side of a small and rapid brook, the clear waters of which plashed and bubbled in the sunlight as they hurried past the brown stones. His fishing-rod lay beside him, hidden in the long grass and the daisies. The sun was hot in the valley—shining on a wall of gray rock behind him, and throwing purple shadows over the clefts; shining on the dark bushes beside the stream and on the lush green of the meadows; shining on the trees beyond, in the shadow of which some dark red cattle were standing. Then away on the other side of the valley rose gently-sloping woods, gray and green in the haze of the heat, and over these again was the pale blue sky with scarcely a cloud in it. It was a hot day to be found in spring-time, but the waters of the brook seemed cool and pleasant as they gurgled by, and occasionally a breath of wind blew over from the woods. For the rest, he lay so still on this fine, indolent, dreamy morning that the birds around seemed to take no note of his presence, and one of the large woodpeckers, with his scarlet head and green body brilliant in the sun, flew close by him and disappeared into the bushes opposite like a sudden gleam of color shot by a diamond.
"Next month," he was thinking to himself as he lay with his hands behind his head, not caring to shade his handsome and well-tanned face from the warm sun—"next month I shall be twenty-one, and most folks will consider me a man. Anyhow, I don't know the man whom I wouldn't fight or run or ride or shoot against for any wager he liked. But of all the people who know anything about me, just that one whose opinion I care for will not consider me a man at all, but only a boy. And that without saying anything. You can tell, somehow, by a mere look, what her feelings are; and you know that what she thinks is true. Of course it's true—I am only a boy. What's the good of me to anybody? I could look after a farm—that is, I could look after other people doing their work—but I couldn't do any work myself. And that seems to me what she is always looking at: 'What's the good of you, what are you doing, what are you busy about?' It's all very well for her to be busy, for she can do a hundred thousand things, and she is always at them. What can I do?"
Then his wandering day-dreamings took another turn: "It was an odd thing for Mabyn to say—'That is when you are in love with some one.' But those girls take everything for love. They don't know how you can admire, almost to worshiping, the goodness of a woman, and how you are anxious that she should be well and happy, and how you would do anything in the world to please her, without fancying straight away that you are in love with her, and want to marry her and drive about in the same carriage with her. I shall be quite as fond of Wenna Rosewarne when she is married, although I shall hate that little brute with his rum and his treacle. The cheek of him, in asking her to marry him, is astonishing. He is the most hideous little beast that could have been picked out to marry any woman, but I suppose he has appealed to her compassion, and then she'll do anything. But if there was anybody else in love with her, if she cared the least bit about anybody else, wouldn't I go straight to her and insist on her shunting that fellow aside? What claim has he on any other feeling of hers but her compassion? Why, if that fellow were to come and try to frighten her, and if I were in the affair, and if she appealed to me even by a look, then there would be short work with something or somebody."
He got up hastily, with something of a gloomy and angry look on his face. He did not notice that he had startled all the birds around from out of the bushes. He picked up his rod and line in a morose fashion, not seeming to care about adding to the half dozen small and red-speckled trout he had in his basket.