"No," said Lord Jocelyn. "Ask what men can ever do that they should be rewarded with the love and trust of such a woman as you?"
That is, indeed, a difficult question, seeing in what words the virtuous woman has been described by one who writes as if he ought to have known. As a pendant to the picture 'tis pity, 'tis great pity we have not the eulogy of the virtuous man. But there never were any, perhaps.
Lord Jocelyn stayed with Angela all the afternoon. They talked of many things; of Harry's boyhood, of his gentle and ready ways, of his many good qualities, and of Angela herself, her hopes and ambitions, and of their life at Bormalack's. And Angela told Lord Jocelyn about her protégés, the claimants to the Davenant peerage, with the history of the "Roag in Grane," Saturday Davenant; and Lord Jocelyn promised to call upon them.
It was five o'clock when she sent him away, with permission to come again. Now this, Lord Jocelyn felt, as he came away, was the most satisfactory, nay the most delightful, day that he had ever spent.
That lucky rascal Harry! To think of this tremendous stroke of fortune! To fall in love with the richest heiress in England; to have that passion returned, to be about to marry the most charming, the most beautiful, the sweetest woman that had ever been made. Happy, thrice happy boy! What wonder, now, that he found tinkering chairs, in company, so to speak, with that incomparable woman, better than the soft divans of his club or the dinners and dances of society? What had he, Lord Jocelyn, to offer the lad, in comparison with the delights of this strange and charming courtship?
CHAPTER XL. SWEET NELLY.
In every love-story there is always, though it is not always told, a secondary plot, the history of the man or woman who might have been left happy but for the wedding bells which peal for somebody else and end the tale. When these ring out, the hopes and dreams of some one else, for whom they do not ring, turn at last to dust and ashes. We are drawing near the church; we shall soon hear those bells. Let us spare a moment to speak of this tale untold, this dream of the morning, doomed to disappointment.
It is only the dream of a foolish girl; she was young and ignorant; she was brought up in a school of hardship until the time when a gracious lady came to rescue her. She had experienced, outside the haven of rest, where her father was safely sheltered, only the buffets of a hard and cruel world, filled with greedy taskmasters who exacted the uttermost farthing in work and paid the humblest farthing for reward. More than this, she knew, and her father knew, that when his time came for exchanging that haven for the cemetery, she would have to fight the hard battle alone, being almost a friendless girl, too shrinking and timid to stand up for herself. Therefore, after her rescue, at first she was in the seventh heaven; nor did her gratitude and love toward her rescuer ever know any abatement. But there came a time when gratitude was called upon to contend with another feeling.