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• “If—if this man had put this into one of the Ballarat papers, Varley or one of the boys would have shot him,” remarked Esmeralda, with a flash of her eyes.
• “As long as you do, it does not matter,” said Lord Selvaine.
• He turned and gazed at the house pensively, and Trafford looked at it also.
• “Esmeralda and I have parted!” he said. “No; don’t ask any question! Let that suffice. We have parted! Go back to the house.”
• “You hear?” said the other man to Esmeralda.
• He strode on, heedless of the direction he was taking, and as heedless of the time. His excitement gave place to a dull, hopeless weariness. Presently he felt that the air had grown cooler; it was the chill of early dawn. He stood in the center of the lonely heath, and looked round him, and its vague outlines seemed to symbolize his own life; for he felt as Esmeralda had done, that it had come to a sudden stop. He turned and walked slowly back to the cottage. The dawn was breaking, and a thrush was beginning to sing timidly and[193] sweetly as he went up the narrow path. Somehow, it reminded him of Esmeralda’s voice. He entered the house, and went upstairs very quietly, and he paused at the door and listened with knit brows, and his lips moved, shaping the words: “My love, my love!” Then he went into his own room, and threw himself, dressed as he was, upon the bed; and he, too, lay awake communing with his unhappiness.
• He stopped those tremulous lips with a kiss—the kiss that betrays. The carriage dashed down a steep bill, rattled along a street so narrow that the wheels seemed to grind against the house-fronts on each side, down hill again, and then the horse was pulled up suddenly in a stony square, and the door opened, and the soft, fresh sea-breeze blew[Pg 307] among her loosened hair, and upon her uncovered neck, and she heard the gentle plish-plash of a boat moored against the quay at her feet.
• “Miss Chetwynde is Lady Wyndover’s ward,” said Lord Selvaine. “She has only just arrived in England, and this is her first acquaintance with Vanity Fair. I ought to add that she is wise enough not to dance, and so is reveling in the easy joys of the mere spectator.”
• Trafford bowed his head.
• “And have you not?” she said. “Tell me who it is, for I see there is some one.”
• Before he had time to get out his revolver, she had snatched hers from her pocket and fired. He heard a cry, and saw a man rise from behind the bushes, sway to and fro, and then fall on his face.
• One evening, about a week later, he was leaning against a tree beside his tent, when he saw the doctor coming from the hut. Something in his gait, in the poise of his head, sent the blood to Trafford’s face. He came forward eagerly, with the unspoken question in his eyes.
• “I will go now,” said Lady Ada. “Good-bye, Trafford. Remember, though you are lost to me forever, my love is never dead, can never die. How could it, while I remembered that though she bought you with her accursed money she has not bought your heart. That is still mine, Trafford. Say it; bend down and whisper it, oh, my love, my love!”
• “Perhaps,” she said, listlessly, as she thought that Trafford would be glad that she had gone so noiselessly and quietly. He would have Lady Ada to console him.
• Mother Melinda laughed again—chuckled, rather.
• As she spoke, she glanced toward the inner bedroom. His eyes followed hers, and he saw that the bed had not been slept in. A crimson light seemed to flash across his eyes, and then for a moment he became blind. He stood looking with sightless eyes at the bed; then, without a word, he turned and walked away with uncertain steps like a drunken man.
• At the sound of his voice the row ceased as if by magic. Men stuck their revolvers and knives in their belts and turned toward him, as if there had never been any fight going on at all.
• “You don’t deserve that I should,” she said. “Oh! I have left my fan on Lady Blankyre’s chair—” She broke off.
• The man looked at her with a reluctant admiration.
• “‘Why, that’s what I’ve come here for!’”
• “I know,” said Esmeralda, with a nod. “There was a man here who lent money like that. The boys tarred and feathered him.”
• “What was that?” asked Esmeralda.
• “Is there no coach, no vehicle, to take me?” asked Trafford.
• “No, you wouldn’t have been able to go by the ‘Neptune,’ though, for she was full up. Her last two berths were taken this afternoon.”
• “Mr. Elmbourne—the first man in England—in the world. He is the Prime Minister—the Queen’s chief adviser. He is a great friend of Lady Blankyre’s, and he has left the House of Commons for five minutes’ talk with her.”
• “Why not?” said Esmeralda; “she’s only a girl!”
• “Yes,” said Varley in a broken voice, “not satisfied with breaking her heart, you were the cause of my very nearly killing the being I love better than my life.”
• There was a light in the hut, and at the sound of the approaching horse, Mother Melinda came to the door with her candle held above her head. As its rays fell upon Esmeralda she uttered a shriek and dropped the candle. The next instant Esmeralda was in her arms, and the two women were sobbing, laughing, and exclaiming as only women can.
• “What a lovely morning!” he said. His voice was grave and weary, though he tried to make it light, and she had noticed that he was pale and haggard.
• He dismounted, and loosely fastening the bridle to a tree, so that the horse could feed, entered the hut. It was in ruins, and looked as if it had been left hastily. Trafford half hoped that he might find some remnant of food, but there was nothing of the kind. He went down to the stream and got a drink of water, and threw himself down to wait until the horse had rested and he could resume his journey.
• He laughed again.
• “We’re on, Varley!” responded Bill, briefly. “Here’s the boys accordin’ to orders; but they don’t know what game’s afoot.”
• “Did I speak about her when I was raving?” he said. “That must be Ada Lancing—Lady Ada Lancing.”
• “Our late client, Mr. Gordon Chetwynde”—he pronounced the name as if it produced a pleasant flavor in his mouth—“became a widower soon after his marriage, and was left with an only daughter—an extremely touching position, Mr. Howard.”
• “And he allowed you to make this journey alone?” he asked in those ultra-quiet tones which were always so ominous with him.
• “Oh, you stand in, Varley?” said MacGrath.
• He extended his hand with profound humility.
• Lady Wyndover accepted at once, though the mere prospect of driving in an open carriage filled her with horror.
• “My God! have some mercy, child!” broke from him, the sweat standing on his white brow.
• [348]
• “A Marchioness of Trafford could scarcely do that,” he said, simply. “It was almost better for her to have done what she did; but let us go now, my dear; I am afraid I have saddened you with my dismal story. Let us get into the sunshine again.” And he, too, shuddered slightly.
• Esmeralda was placed on the duke’s right, and his grace exerted himself to entertain the two ladies as he had not done[133] for years; but after awhile he devoted himself to Esmeralda. He could see her loveliness more distinctly in the soft candle-light, and the Belfayres were quick to appreciate feminine beauty. He noticed, as Lilias had done, the sweetness and clearness of her voice, and her unconventional frankness and candor charmed him. She was not awed for a moment by her surroundings—as it must be confessed Lady Wyndover was—and she talked freely. Trafford heard his father’s rare laugh more than once, and once he saw his grace bend forward, and lay his hand upon Esmeralda’s.
• “A great responsibility has been laid upon you, Lady[53] Wyndover,” he said. “I now have the pleasure to place your ward in your hands. As you say, she—er—is extremely beautiful, and is possessed of an immense fortune. This you know already; but I shall be extremely surprised if you do not shortly discover that she is possessed of something else.”
• "Adolphe has habits," he meditated, "but success is not one of them."
• Esmeralda laughed slightly.
• “But why?” said Esmeralda. “Is he a very great lord, very rich? What?”
• “I should have liked to have met him,” he said, dryly. He added, mentally: “And to have played cards with him.”
• “It ain’t for me to say,” Esmeralda heard him answer.[304] “Simon’s gone away for a bit; she can speak to him when he comes back.”
• Esmeralda stood like a lay figure while the rest of the dresses were tried on, and Lady Wyndover, with a deep sigh, declared herself satisfied.
• "Oh, John Hulbert is good; he is frank and true. He is not like the other. But oh, Martin, pity Lostwithiel and his sin, as you pity me and my sin! It is past and done. I was mad when I cared for him—a creature under a spell. You won my heart back to you by your goodness—you made me more than ever your own. All that he had ever been to me—all that I had ever thought or felt about him—was blotted out as if I had never seen his face. Nothing remained but my love for you—and my guilty conscience, the aching misery of knowing that I was unworthy of you."
• Esmeralda’s heart was touched by the warmth of his greeting. She felt her eyes grow dim, and unconsciously her hand fluttered in the old man’s as she caught Trafford’s eyes fixed upon her with a “Did I not tell you so?” expression.
• “I know now!” he said in the tone of triumph and satisfaction we use when we have succeeded in remembering. “It was you who caught Lady Ada’s horse in the park yesterday.”
• The long night was over; and the sun was high. It seemed as if they were sailing over a summer sea, and through the scuttle port she saw a little foreign town nestling under the shelter of pine-clad hills.
• “I am sorry,” said Varley in his most languid tones. “I have something I want to say to her very badly. Do you know when she is coming back?”
• “Hear me out!” said Trafford. “Norman and Esmeralda were with us at Belfayre. She and I were separated; he loved her still; it was only natural that he, they, should be tempted. I see, now, how much excuse there was for her—yes, and for him.”
• The quay, and the water, and the few faint lights here and there grew dark, and she knew no more, till she heard the sailors crying, "Yeo, heave, yeo," and the heavy sails flapping, and the creak of the boom as it swayed in the wind, and felt the dancing motion of the boat as she cut her way through the waves, felt the strong arm that clasped her, and heard the low, fond voice that murmured in her ear, "Isola, Isola, forgive me! I could not live without you."
• "And then, one evening in the twilight, he told me that he loved me. I was very angry—and I let him see that I was angry, and I did all I could to avoid him after[Pg 296] that evening. I refused to go to the ball at Lostwithiel, knowing that I must meet him there. But they all persuaded me—Mrs. Crowther, Mrs. Baynham, Tabitha—they were all bent upon making me go—and I went. Oh, God, if I had but stood firm against their foolish persuasion, if I had but been true to myself! But my own heart fought against me. I wanted to see him again—if only for the last time. He had talked about starting for a long cruise to the Mediterranean. His yacht was ready to sail at an hours notice."
• “Yes, she has left me,” he repeated; “but I am desirous[321] of finding her, and I am going to Three Star for that purpose.”
• “Lilias, I can’t put it off any longer. I love you, dearest! Will you be my wife?”
• The words had a ring of anguish in them that found an echo in his heart and made him half turn to her. But her face, the look in her eyes, kept him back.
• “If you remember,” continued the duke in his soft voice, and with the same smile and manner, “that gentleman made an elaborate plan for transforming the bay into a watering-place.”
• “This room seems hot,” he said.
• “Been killin’ any one, Varley, and want to provide for the widow?” asked one. “Where have you come from?”
• CHAPTER XXIII.
• “Yes; you don’t understand. You are now my ward.[60] You are the rich Miss Chetwynde, and quite a personage. You are the great catch of this coming season.”
• “What is it?” said Esmeralda.
• “Why, Norman!” he cried. “Is it really you? My dear fellow, I am glad to see you.”
• Lady Wyndover put out a trembling hand and touched him on the arm.
• “It is a shame to trouble you with business, Trafford, directly you arrive; but I sometimes think that Helby is scarcely—scarcely as energetic as he used to be. I’ve an idea—it may be erroneous—that the stables, for instance, are not as well kept up as they should be. As you know, we have always made a point of—of filling the stalls. You are fond of horses, I know, Trafford, and I should be deeply grieved if you were to find it necessary to complain of a scarcity, or the quality, of the horses. Will you please go over the stables to-morrow, and look into the matter?”
• They were silent for a minute or two. A strange feeling took possession of her. She did not know that she was happier, that her heart was beating with a subtle joy; but the sky seemed bluer and brighter, the birds sung more blithely, the sunlight grew more brilliant, and suffused her with a deeper warmth. His touch seemed to linger on her arm, and her hand burned where his lips had pressed it.
• [12]
• “Yes,” said Esmeralda; “I should like a beefsteak, a big one, and some potatoes, and a custard pudding, with currants in it, and any little trifle of that kind suited to an invalid with a huge appetite; but I suppose it will be the usual beef-tea and the piece of toast. You wait a little while. I’ll have my revenge. I’ll shut you up in a hut, and feed you on beef-tea for a few weeks, and then I’ll ask you if there is anything you fancy, you cruel old woman!”
• There had been several “warm nights” at Three Star; but this, the night of Esmeralda’s return, was the very, very warmest that had ever been recorded.
• “We didn’t to-night,” said Norman. “The conversation was rather limited to one subject.”
• One day they were caught in a heavy shower, and Esmeralda, who had contrived to leave her umbrella at home, was in danger of being wet through. She thought nothing of it; but Trafford was greatly concerned.
• Death would have delivered her. The tempest was her friend; and the tempest had passed her by, and left her lying there like a weed, more worthless than any weed that over the sea cast up to rot upon the barren rocks. Yes, she was left there; left in a life that sin had blighted; loathsome to herself, hateful to her God.
• He looked at her horror-stricken, their two faces close to each other as he bent over her pillow.
• Let its northernmost corner be Vicksburg, the famous, on the Mississippi. Let the easternmost be Mobile, and let the most southerly and by far the most important, that pivotal corner of the fan from which all its folds radiate and where the whole pictured thing opens and shuts, be New Orleans. Then let the grave moment that gently ushers us in be a long-ago afternoon in the Louisiana Delta.
• “No, no,” she said. “I—I meant to tell you!”
• Trafford could not speak. He turned back into the room and looked round for her. He could not see her.
• “You can always rely upon me, Trafford,” she said; “always!”
• Trafford’s brows came down.
• Esmeralda said that she would be delighted, and the old man looked round with a pleased smile.
• “My dear Trafford, she is charming!” he said—“perfectly charming! I do not know that I have ever met any one so fresh and intensely interesting. Chetwynde? There are the Chetwyndes of Warwickshire; I knew some of them—but they were stupid people—quite stupid!”
• Stretched upon the rude bed was the dead woman, covered decently and reverently by a blanket. Mother Melinda had undressed the child, and it was lying asleep in an empty biscuit box. Varley Howard uncovered its face and looked at it thoughtfully. It was a pretty child, with thick, reddish-brown hair, and the lashes that lay upon its cheek were dark and long.
• In the ground-floor dining-room of that unanimated hotel sat an old gentleman named Brodnax, once of the regular army, a retired veteran of the Mexican war, and very consciously possessed of large means. He sat quite alone, in fine dress thirty years out of fashion, finishing a late lunch and reading a newspaper; a trim, hale man not to be called old in his own hearing. He had read everything intended for news or entertainment and was now wandering in the desert of the advertising columns, with his mind nine miles away, at the other end of New Orleans.
• “You can not deny it,” he said, between his teeth. “I have seen you together! Do you think I have forgotten your manner when I brought him to you, thinking you were strangers? And if I wanted clearer proof of the vile truth, I have it here.”
• "Oh, John Hulbert is good; he is frank and true. He is not like the other. But oh, Martin, pity Lostwithiel and his sin, as you pity me and my sin! It is past and done. I was mad when I cared for him—a creature under a spell. You won my heart back to you by your goodness—you made me more than ever your own. All that he had ever been to me—all that I had ever thought or felt about him—was blotted out as if I had never seen his face. Nothing remained but my love for you—and my guilty conscience, the aching misery of knowing that I was unworthy of you."
• “Ah!” She drew a long breath. “At any rate, I have learned to value true love and friendship, Varley. I think they are only to be found in Three Star.”
• Trafford could bear no more. He rose and staggered out of the hut and leaned against the wall, with his face upon his arm.
• [83]
• [105]
• “Dreadful! This is dreadful, my lord!” he said. “What is to be done? There is only one thing: if the marquis would only do it.”
• “It is not true,” said Trafford, rather grimly, and angry with himself for feeling angry.
• From that moment, from the moment she had taken the wedding-ring from her finger, she had, in her mind, ceased to be Trafford’s wife; she was no longer the Marchioness of Trafford, but Esmeralda Howard.
• Esmeralda looked at her thoughtfully.
• “Get up into your seats, gentlemen,” he said. “The little play is over.”
• Trafford shook his head.
• There were one or two early riders on the tan-laid course, and after awhile, she stopped, and with her hand resting lightly on the iron rail, watched them as they rode by. Presently she saw, approaching the spot where she stood, a lady and gentleman, and something about them attracted her attention. The gentleman was tall and slim, and singularly handsome, but not with the beauty of the barber’s wax figure, though his features were almost as regular. He was dark, with grave and rather sad eyes; and he rode a hard-looking chestnut.
• “My father will be here presently,” he said. “He is looking forward to seeing you.”
• “I hope you won’t lose your appetite in London. It’s a very trying place. And now tell me all about yourself. Of course, I know how you have been living in that place with the curious name, and how Mr. Pinchook found you. Tell me about your guardian and your friends; in fact, anything you can think of.”
• Norman looked rather surprised.
• Lady Wyndover looked at her with a persuasive smile.
• “I ought not to have done—said—what I did. I deserve that you should be very angry with me. Are you?”
• Lady Wyndover broke into a storm of tears.
• “He’s young as yet miss; and you mustn’t ask too much of him, if you please,” he said to Esmeralda.
• Esmeralda dropped back with a sigh.
• “And she has accepted you? Thank the Lord!”
• “Nor is it,” said Lady Wyndover. “It is only in the next street—Mount Street.”
• “Oh, yes, very,” said Esmeralda. “It was great fun on board the ship.”
• He took Esmeralda’s hand.
• He laughed again.
• “Oh, that I am sure you haven’t, my dear,” said Lady Wyndover. “He must have been only too delighted to chaperon a charming young girl.”
• “She is not here. You thought— Do you mean to say that you don’t know where she is?”
• He changed places with her, and she took the reins and the whip in true coachman-like fashion; and she laughed, and her eyes flashed, and her lips parted, as she drove the splendid bays along the top of the hill; and Trafford looked at her, and the sense of her beauty and her youth smote him for the first time in all its fullness.
• “Daughters of millionaires are generally given to that sort of thing, aren’t they?” said Varley Howard.
• [346]
• He looked at her with momentary surprise; but even yet there was no time to ask questions.
• “One never can tell,” she said. “But I will promise; yes, and—and, Norman, you shall be the friend you want to be to me, because—because of that night we will both forget after this.”
• Then she let her head fall upon the pillow and closed her eyes, to think, not to sleep.
• “Wait till we get home,” she whispered.
• The long night was over; and the sun was high. It seemed as if they were sailing over a summer sea, and through the scuttle port she saw a little foreign town nestling under the shelter of pine-clad hills.
• “No, no,” she said; “it will be quite warm out there. I hate being smothered up.”
• “It is fairyland!” he said, with a laugh. “Let us explore.”
• Johnson was a little mollified.
• She turned her large, luminous eye upon him thoughtfully.
• “It is ever so long,” she said.
• “She really is the most brilliant creature I have ever met!” she said. “One quite forgets, while listening to her, that she is only a girl. No wonder you are so proud of her, and Trafford is so devoted. It really makes one wish that our own girls could go out for a time to the wilds of Australia on the chance of their acquiring something of the dear marchioness’s spirit.”
• Trafford waved his hand while the house was still in sight, then carefully and gently brushed the rice from Esmeralda’s clothes.
• [347]
• “He has asked me to go down to see his relations,” she said.
• He wiped the cold sweat from his face, and went out into the night.
• “You’ll do that, whatever you wear, my lady,” she said, with perfect honesty. “I’m glad your ladyship takes an[201] interest— I beg your pardon, my lady, but you never seemed to care at Deepdale.”
• Concerning the proceedings of the boys at the Eldorado which immediately followed her exit, and were kept up until the dawn rose above the hills, the kindly historian will be silent. Suffice it that MacGrath’s whisky was completely sold out, and that Taffy was conducted to his virtuous couch by a devious course of something like a mile in length by several fellow-convivialists who, having deposited that hero in bed, deemed it wise and expedient to coil themselves up on the floor beside him.
• The blood rose to her face again; his touch moved her more than all his words had done.
• Esmeralda stood quite still, thinking.
• “This room seems hot,” he said.
• “No, don’t, please,” she said, quite simply; “I’ve too many already. It takes Lady Wyndover and me half an hour to decide which I’m to wear. As if it mattered!”
• Varley bowed his head.
• “There’s no occasion to look like that,” she said, in a way that reminded him of Three Star. “Why shouldn’t you be in love with her or any one else?” She laughed. “You don’t think I mind?” for Norman still looked uncomfortable. “Why should you keep on remembering what—what happened ever so long ago—when I’d quite forgotten it?” she added, rather cruelly. “And I don’t see how you could help falling in love with her, and I think you’ll be a very lucky young man if you can persuade her to fall in love with you. And mind,” she went on, almost fiercely, “if you can get her, marry her! Never mind being a pauper, never mind people telling you that because you haven’t any money of your own you ought to marry some wretched girl who has. Shall I tell you what would happen if you did?”
• “Yes, yes,” she said in a subdued voice. “How long it has been!”
• “I do not know what to say!” she said in a very low voice.
• “You think that, you say that,” she said, with a kind of sad bitterness. “Would you answer me frankly, truthfully, if I were to ask you a question, Lord Trafford?”
• “Anything—it does not matter,” she said.
• They went into the drawing-room. Lilias was seated in a low chair by the window, looking at the magnificent view. Lilias was at a piece of fancy-work which she sometimes affected; Lady Ada was at the piano, scarcely playing, but touching a note here and there, too softly to be a nuisance. Norman looked at each of them, then round the room, with a feeling of indefinable disquietude. Something seemed to be in the air.
• Lilias went, and Barker came. Esmeralda was sitting by the open window.
• Esmeralda and Norman heard the cry, and both turned their heads in his direction, but he was completely hidden behind the rocks, and they saw nothing of him.
• Lord Selvaine smiled again; and the smile seemed to irritate Trafford.
• She looked from side to side, like a timid animal at bay.
• “Yes,” responded Norman, wiping his face, for he was hot and tired, and there was a tone of anxiety and eagerness in his voice. “It is strange that I should run against you the first moment of my arrival—the man I wanted to see so badly.”
• “Anything the matter, Ralda?” he asked.
• Trafford looked straight before him at the opposite wall. And at that moment he did not look very happy, for there rose before him the face of Ada Lancing, and he seemed to hear her voice, hoarse with agony.
• “A daughter of the gods,” she repeated. It is needless to say that she had never heard of Tennyson; but the well-known and oft-quoted line conveyed something of its meaning[37] to her. “And can she ride and shoot and swim? Could she climb that tree there?”
• Vision or reality, she was passing before him. He could see the exquisite outline of her profile, could catch the glimpse of the red-gold hair that hung in tangled confusion upon her shoulders.
• He had never entered her room before. Why had he come to-night? A sudden hope shot warmly through her heart, and the blood began to rise in her face; then it died away again, for as he came forward into the light of the softly shaded lamp, she saw his face and noted its haggard and stern expression. There was something in his dark eyes that she had never seen there before—a terrible sternness which added a vague terror to her surprise at his presence.
• “A man should leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife.”
• Trafford glanced at Esmeralda gravely; but, quite innocently, she said:
• Trafford inclined his head. He scarcely realized what was happening, and yet he felt the rude justice of it. It was true that he had married Esmeralda for her money, and, so far, Varley Howard was only exacting his right.
• [317]
• Esmeralda smiled.
• He dropped his head in his hands, and hid his face.
• Both Trafford and Varley started as if to go also; but Norman waved them back.
• She took off his hat, and put her flower-bedecked one in its place; and, strange to say, Varley’s remarkable good looks came through even this severe test triumphantly.
• Her eyes met his for a moment, then looked away.
• “Weren’t you?” he said, gratefully. “I thought you were—you left me without a word.”
• “Barker might take me to take care of her,” she said; “and I don’t think Thomas, for all he’s tall as a lamp-post, would be much use in a row. He looks as if he’d break off if he bent too suddenly. Besides, there never is any row, is there? It always looks so quiet when we drive through. And those policemen—what are they for? No. I won’t have Barker or Thomas, and I’ll go alone—if you won’t come with me.”
• “I am nearly always happy,” she said.
• When he reached the first lodge, an exquisitely beautiful little building, kept with such scrupulous neatness—the ivy closely clipped, the lattice windows shining like diamonds, the stone mullion white and spotless, the garden like a toy, with its spring flowers—that it looked as if it had been built yesterday, instead of a century ago, the lodge-keeper’s wife came out and opened the gates, and courtesied with a subdued little smile, as if she were glad to see him, but wouldn’t for the world be so disrespectful as to show it.
• There was a gentle significance in the question which brought the color to Lilias’s face. Esmeralda said no more, and both girls stood in silence and watched the solitary figure pacing up and down between them; then Lilias kissed Esmeralda.
• “All right, old chap; didn’t mean anything offensive; didn’t know she was a friend of yours.”
• “I know,” she said, with a deep sigh. “My money made you forget what I was. Lady Wyndover used to say that it was no matter what I did. I didn’t understand that, among other things, but I do now. And I do not blame her for the part she has played.”
• Barker twisted the chain of the locket into a bracelet and despairfully slipped it over Esmeralda’s wrist. As she did so, there came a knock at the door. Barker opened it. It was Lady Ada; she was in her dressing-robe.
• “That girl!” she said. “A girl from the wilds; a nobody; a vulgar parvenue!” Her hands were clinched to her side; her breath came fast; her blue eyes flashed like fire.
• “Put your hand on my shoulder,” she said, “and step on my knee.”
• “There’s the entry; you can see for yourself, sir,” he said, rather sullenly, and pointing to the book. Trafford looked at it, and for a moment could see nothing; then he read the line, “Lord Norman Druce, two berths. Nos. 128, 129. Paid.”
• “Yes,” said Lilias, with a smile; “Norman is here, and Ada Lancing, and one or two others. We thought you might be dull!”
• “No; but we have heard of her,” said Varley, standing beside the fire, and he read Simon’s note. The men stood silent for a minute in that intense reaction from a terrible suspense.
• The boy and his nurse went back to Trelasco under Tabitha's escort, and they were followed to Cornwall soon afterwards by the new Lord Lostwithiel and his wife, who established themselves at the Mount, to the great satisfaction of the neighbourhood, where it was felt that the local nobleman had again become a permanent institution. Allegra and her husband took Martin Disney's son under their protection in the absence of his father, who carried a heavy heart back to the jungle and the tent, trying to find distraction and forgetfulness in the pursuit of big game, and who did not revisit the Angler's Nest till two years after his wife's death, when he returned to live a tranquil life among the books in the library which he had built for himself, and to watch the growth of his son, whose every look and tone recalled the image of his dead wife. Sometimes, on drowsy summer afternoons, smoking his pipe under the tulip tree, while the Fowey river rippled by in the sunshine, it seemed to him as if Isola's pensive loveliness, and the years that he had lived with her, and the tears that he had shed for her, and the infinite pity which had blotted out all sense of his deep wrong, were only the transient phases of a long sad dream—the dream of a love that never was returned.
• “I am glad we are rich, Varley,” she said.
• “And do your hair, too, miss?” asked Barker, with wild astonishment.
• He looked at her.
• Esmeralda sprung into her saddle.
• “Halloo, Traff! Here you are at last!” said a boyish voice.
• She sat, where he had left her, looking out at the night with vacant eyes. Her life seemed to have come to a sudden stop; he had taken all the joy, the hope in it away with him.
• “Ah!” remarked Varley in the slowest of drawls. “We have a great deal to thank Lady Ada Lancing for. We owe her a great debt. It’s a pity she isn’t a man or—we could pay her!”
• The men glanced at him from time to time as he leaned back in his tilted chair and read and tore up his letters with languid impassiveness; and Taffy, rousing from a peaceful slumber, got up and drifted across the room to him, and now quite sober, looked down at him sheepishly.
• Lilias looked out.
• “What is it, dear?” she asked, with loving anxiety. “You have kept up so well until now.”
• “What is yours?” he asked.
• “For a two-millionaire—yes,” assented Varley Howard. “If he had been a curate he would have had half a dozen daughters and three or four sons thrown in.”
• The saloon, a long and narrow room, built of rough, feather-edged boards and decorated with scraps of turkey-red cotton and cheap calico lining, with occasional portraits of local celebrities rudely drawn in charcoal, was well filled with the crew of miners and camp followers which made up the population of Three Star Camp—Three Star, it is needless to explain, after the well-known legend on the brandy bottles.
• “Er—er—so he informed me,” said Mr. Pinchook. “Now, Mr. Howard, I shall be extremely obliged if you will render me every assistance you can in this matter, and—er—tell me where I can find the daughter and heiress of our client, Mr. Gordon Chetwynde.”
• The duke looked at her with curiosity veiled behind his kind and courtly smile; then he extended his long, white hand, and held hers, as he said in his low, slow voice, which had a ring of Trafford’s in it:
• “Ah!” said Trafford. “I did not say that I myself understood her. She is unlike any woman I have ever met; and she will follow the dictates of her own heart.”
• Trafford, quivering with excitement and a mixture of emotions, let the horse have its head, and the animal trotted quickly down the slope to the valley below. At a sudden bend in the track—if it could be called track—Trafford caught sight of a small stream, the ground near which had been broken and disturbed by the hand of man. He conjectured that this must be the site of an abandoned camp or gold-digging, and the conjecture proved correct, for he came presently upon a ruined hut standing amidst some deserted claims.
• [171]
• “By Heaven! there is no one like you,” he said—“no one in the whole world so good, so generous!”
• He did all the talking, and, even to him, she seemed strangely silent.
• “I suppose that you are surprised he isn’t married?” said Lady Ada, loathing herself as she spoke.
• Lord Chesterleigh came up and spoke to him, and he scarcely knew what Chesterleigh was saying or what he himself responded. Esmeralda seemed to evade him like a will-o’-the-wisp; from whatever part of the room she was standing or sitting there came bursts and ripples of laughter; those who were not immediately round her or talking to her were talking of her. Old Lady Desford sung her praises in the duke’s ready ear.
• “I believed you,” she went on, almost as if she were speaking to herself. “I thought you—you cared for me—”

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