Lunch came. I couldn’t eat a bit: I should have choked. Bessy ate plenty, and drank a glass of beer. It was her dinner, to be sure. Young Blacksheep did not appear. We did not miss him. When Lady Baker began to tell her story of George IV. at Slane Castle, I went into my own room. I took a book. Books? Paha! I went into the garden. I took out a cigar. But no, I would not smoke it. Perhaps she——many people don’t like smoking.
I went into the garden. “Come into the garden, Maud.” I sate by a large lilac bush. I waited. Perhaps, she would come. The morning-room windows were wide open on to the lawn. Will she never come? Ah! what is that tall form advancing? gliding—gliding into the chamber like a beauteous ghost? Who most does like an angel show, you may be sure ’tis she. She comes up to the glass. She lays her spectacles down on the mantel-piece. She puts a slim white hand over her auburn hair and looks into the mirror. Elizabeth, Elizabeth! I come!
As I came up, I saw a horrid little grinning, debauched face surge over the back of a great arm-chair and look towards Elizabeth. It was Captain Blacksheep, of course. He laid his elbows over the chair. He looked keenly and with a diabolical smile at the unconscious girl; and just as I reached the window, he cried out, “Betsy Bellenden, by Jove!”
Elizabeth turned round, gave a little cry, and——but what happened I shall tell in the ensuing chapter.
FOOTNOTES
[1] To another celebrated critic. Dear Sir—You think I mean you, but upon my honour I don’t.
Colour Blindness.
If there is one infirmity or defect of those five senses with which we are most of us blest, which more than any other attracts sympathy and claims compassionate consideration, it is blindness—an inability to know what is beautiful in form or in colour, to appreciate light, or to recognize and comprehend the varying features of our fellow-men—a perpetual darkness in the midst of a world of light—a total exclusion from the readiest, pleasantest, and most available means of acquiring ideas.
And yet who would suppose that there exists, and is tolerably common, a partial blindness, which has hardly been described as a defect for more than half a century, and of which it may be said even now that most of those who suffer from it are not only themselves ignorant of the fact, but that those about them can hardly be induced to believe it. The unhappy victims of this partial blindness (which is real and physical, not moral) are at great pains in learning what to them are minute distinctions of tint, although to the rest of the world they are differences of colour of the most marked kind, and, after all, they only obtain the credit of unusual stupidity or careless inattention in reward for their exertions and in sympathy for their visual defect. We allude to a peculiarity of vision which first attracted notice in the case of the celebrated propounder of the atomic theory in chemistry, the late Dr. Dalton, of Manchester, who on endeavouring to find some object to compare in colour with his scarlet robe of doctor of laws, when at Cambridge, could hit on nothing which better agreed with it than the foliage of the adjacent trees, and who to match his drab coat—for our learned doctor was of the Society of Friends—might possibly have selected crimson continuations as the quietest and nearest match the pattern-book of his tailor exhibited.