The Squire looked at him with a gleam of suspicion. His wife Mary was bad-tempered and did rule him, and that in an unpleasantly harsh way. Derwent smiled still, and the Squire merely reached for his glass of whisky and water and hoped that his host was unconsciously ironical.
"Then you won't marry?" he asked.
"I don't say that," Derwent answered. At moments in his life he had thought that love might be the beautiful thing of which men raved. Those moments were rare, for the making of money is an occupation which gives little leisure.
"No, I don't say that," he went on. "But I am in no hurry."
"Got my niece coming to-morrow, Derwent," the Squire growled, after a period of silence. "She has no nearer relations, worse luck! Been with a girl friend for a year—father was killed in India, mother died when she was a baby. So she comes to us."
"It is fortunate for her that she has so excellent a home open to her."
"Yes," the Squire answered, lamely. He was not sure whether Derwent did not see under the surface. He was conscious of his wife's outcry about the new expense and the new inconvenience.
A few days later Derwent saw the niece and fell in love with her with all the fierceness of his nature.
She was pretty, but a critical observer would have ended at that qualification. The question was whether anyone could be critical in her presence and under the spell of her eyes.
Her hair was of that shade of brown which has kindred with the sun, but is dusky in the shade. Her nose was small and not very straight, her mouth was small, and her chin set forward with a determined tilt; but her eyes were her glory—large, brown, trusting, and yet unfathomable. Derwent, seeing them, thought of stars in a midnight sky, the stars out West, which had spoken to him in those rare moments when he had respite from dollar making.