As he was thinking of all this Lady Laura stood before him where he was sitting at the top of the falls. At this moment he remembered well all the circumstances of the scene when he had been there with her at his last visit to Loughlinter. How things had changed since then! Then he had loved Lady Laura with all his heart, and he had now already brought himself to regard her as a discreet matron whom to love would be almost as unreasonable as though he were to entertain a passion for the Lord Chancellor. The reader will understand how thorough had been the cure effected by Lady Laura’s marriage and the interval of a few months, when the swain was already prepared to make this lady the depositary of his confidence in another matter of love. “You are often here, I suppose?” said Lady Laura, looking down upon him as he sat upon the rock.
“Well;—yes; not very often; I come here sometimes because the view down upon the lake is so fine.”
“It is the prettiest spot about the place. I hardly ever get here now. Indeed this is only the second time that I have been up since we have been at home, and then I came to bring papa here.” There was a little wooden seat near to the rock upon which Phineas had been lying, and upon this Lady Laura sat down. Phineas, with his eyes turned upon the lake, was considering how he might introduce the subject of his love for Violet Effingham; but he did not find the matter very easy. He had just resolved to begin by saying that Violet would certainly never accept Lord Chiltern, when Lady Laura spoke a word or two which stopped him altogether. “How well I remember,” she said, “the day when you and I were here last autumn!”
“So do I. You told me then that you were going to marry Mr. Kennedy. How much has happened since then!”
“Much indeed! Enough for a whole lifetime. And yet how slow the time has gone!”
“I do not think it has been slow with me,” said Phineas.
“No; you have been active. You have had your hands full of work. I am beginning to think that it is a great curse to have been born a woman.”
“And yet I have heard you say that a woman may do as much as a man.”
“That was before I had learned my lesson properly. I know better than that now. Oh dear! I have no doubt it is all for the best as it is, but I have a kind of wish that I might be allowed to go out and milk the cows.”
“And may you not milk the cows if you wish it, Lady Laura?”
“By no means;—not only not milk them, but hardly look at them. At any rate, I must not talk about them.” Phineas of course understood that she was complaining of her husband, and hardly knew how to reply to her. He had been sharp enough to perceive already that Mr. Kennedy was an autocrat in his own house, and he knew Lady Laura well enough to be sure that such masterdom would be very irksome to her. But he had not imagined that she would complain to him. “It was so different at Saulsby,” Lady Laura continued. “Everything there seemed to be my own.”
“And everything here is your own.”
“Yes—according to the prayerbook. And everything in truth is my own—as all the dainties at the banquet belonged to Sancho the Governor.”
“You mean,” said he—and then he hesitated; “you mean that Mr. Kennedy stands over you, guarding you for your own welfare, as the doctor stood over Sancho and guarded him?”
There was a pause before she answered—a long pause, during which he was looking away over the lake, and thinking how he might introduce the subject of his love. But long as was the pause, he had not begun when Lady Laura was again speaking. “The truth is, my friend,” she said, “that I have made a mistake.”
“A mistake?”
“Yes, Phineas, a mistake. I have blundered as fools blunder, thinking that I was clever enough to pick my footsteps aright without asking counsel from anyone. I have blundered and stumbled and fallen, and now I am so bruised that I am not able to stand upon my feet.” The word that struck him most in all this was his own Christian name. She had never called him Phineas before. He was aware that
