So astonished was I at the question, and because she had divined so, surely, that I did not answer.
“Is it?” she asked again.
“Yes,” I said; “yes, in part.”
And then came voices calling from the house. They had missed her.
“I am so sorry, Richard. I shall tell no one.”
She laid her hand ever so lightly upon mine and was gone. I stood staring after her until she disappeared in the door. All the way home I marvelled, my thoughts tumultuous, my hopes rising and falling.
But when next I saw her, I thought she had forgotten.
We had little company at the Hall that year, on account of Mr. Carvel. And I had been busy indeed. I sought with all my might to master a business for which I had but little taste, and my grandfather complimented me, before the season was done, upon my management. I was wont to ride that summer at four of a morning to canter beside Mr. Starkie afield, and I came to know the yield of every patch to a hogshead and the pound price to a farthing. I grew to understand as well as another the methods of curing the leaf. And the wheat pest appearing that year, I had the good fortune to discover some of the clusters in the sheaves, and ground our oyster-shells in time to save the crop. Many a long evening I spent on the wharves with old Stanwix, now toothless and living on his pension, with my eye on the glow of his pipe and my ear bent to his stories of the sea. It was his fancy that the gift of prophecy had come to him with the years; and at times, when his look would wander to the black rigging in the twilight, he would speak strangely enough.
“Faith, Mr. Richard,” he would say; “tho' your father was a soldier afore ye, ye were born to the deck of a ship-o'-war. Mark an old man's words, sir.”
“Can you see the frigate, Stanwix?” I laughed once, when he had repeated this with more than common solemnity.