“I like everything to look its best,” said Laura, blushing at her own thoughts.
The one solace of her life of late had been to preserve and beautify the good old house and its surroundings. The secret hope that John Treverton would come back some day, and that life would be fair and sweet for her again, was the hidden spring of all her actions. Every morning she said to herself. “He may come today;” every night she consoled herself with the fancy that he might come tomorrow.
“I may have to wait for years,” She said in her graver moments, “but let him come when he will, he shall find that I have been a faithful steward.”
She had never left the Manor House since she came back from her lonely honeymoon. She had received various hospitable invitations from the county families, who were anxious to be civil to her now that she was firmly established among them as a landowner; but she refused all such invitations, excusing herself because of her husband’s enforced absence, When he returned to England she would be delighted to visit with him, and so on; whereby the county people were given to understand that there was nothing extraordinary or unwarrantable in Mr. Treverton’s nonappearance at the Manor House.
“His wife seems to approve of his conduct, so one can only suppose that it’s all right,” said people; notwithstanding which the majority clung affectionately to the supposition that it was all wrong.
Despite Laura’s hopefulness, and that sweetness of temper and gaiety of mind which preserved the youthful beauty of her face, there were hours—one hour, perhaps, in every day—when her spirits drooped, and hope seemed to sicken. She had pored over John Treverton’s last letter until the paper upon which it was written had grown thin and worn with frequent handling; but at the best, dear as the letter was to her, she could not extract much hope from it. The tone of the writer was not utterly hopeless. Yet he spoke of a parting that might be for life; of a tie that might last forever; a tie that bound him in honour, if not in fact, to some other woman.
He had wronged her deeply by that broken marriage—wronged her by supposing that the possession of Jasper Treverton’s estate could in any wise compensate her for the false position in which that marriage had placed her; and yet she could not find it in her heart to be angry with him. She loved him too well. And this letter, whatever guilt it vaguely confessed, overflowed with love for her. She forgave him all things for the sake of that love.
When had she begun to love him? she asked herself sometimes in a sad reverie. She had questioned him closely as to the growth of his love, but had been slow to make her own confession.
How well she remembered his pale, tired face that winter night, just a year and a half ago, when he came into the lamplit room and took his seat on the opposite side of the hearth, a stranger and half an enemy.
She had liked and admired him from the very first, knowing that he was prejudiced against her. The pale, clear cut face, the grey eyes with their black lashes, which made them look black in some lights, hazel in others; the thoughtful mouth, and that all-pervading expression of melancholy which had at once enlisted her sympathy; all these had pleased her.
“I must have been dreadfully weak-minded,” she said to herself, “for I really think I fell in love with him at first sight.”
That little wood behind the Manor House grounds was Laura’s favourite resort in this early summer time. It was the most picturesque of woods, for the ground sloped steeply to a narrow river, on the further side of which there was a rugged bank, topped by a grove of fir-trees. The stream ran brawling over a rocky bed; and the bold masses of rock, here shining purple, or changeful grey, there green with moss; the fringe of ferns upon the river brink, the old half-ruined wooden bridge that spanned the torrent; the background of beech and oak, mingled with the darker foliage of old Scotch firs; and towering darkly above all, the lofty ridge of moorland, made a picture that Laura fondly loved. Here she came when the prim gardens of the Manor House seemed too small to hold her thoughts and cares. Here she seemed to breathe a freer air.
She came to this spot one evening in June, after a day of sunny weather which had seemed longer and wearier and altogether harder to bear than the generality of her days. Celia had been with her all day, and Celia’s small talk had been drearier than solitude. Laura was thankful to be alone, in this quiet shelter, where the indefatigable labours of the woodpecker and the babble of the stream were the only sounds that stirred the summer silence.
All day long the heat had been hardly endurable; now there was a breath of coolness in the air, and nothing left of that fierce stuff but a soft yellow light in the western sky.
Laura had a volume of Shelley in her pocket, taken up from among the books on the table in her favourite room. It was one of the books she loved best, and had been the companion of many a ramble. She seated herself on a fallen trunk of oak beside the river, and opened the volume haphazard at “Rosalind and Helen,” and she read on till she came to those lovely lines which picture such a spot as that where she was sitting.
“To a deep lawny dell they came,
To a stone seat beside a spring,
O’er which the column’d wood did frame.
A roofless temple, like the fane,
Where, ere new creeds could faith obtain
Man’s early race once knelt beneath
The overhanging Deity.”
She read on. The scene suited the poem, and its
