h magic parts.

She seemed content, and yet not wholly happy: he could hear her
sometimes sigh, as he thought, from a mere wistfulness that had the
illimitable spaces of the sea, the peopled isles and all their mystery
for background. To many of the birds that beat and cried about the place
she gave names, investing them with histories, recounting humorously
their careers. And it was odd that however far she sent them in her
fancy--to the distant Ind, to the vexed Pole itself--with joy in their
travelling, she assumed that their greatest joy was when they found
themselves at Doom. The world was a place to fare forth in as far as you
could, only to give you the better zest for Doom on your return.

This pleased her father hugely, but it scarcely tallied with the views
of one who had fond memories of a land where sang the nightingale in its
season, and roads were traversable in the wildest winter weather; still
Count Victor was in no mood to question it.

He was, save in rare moments of unpleasant reflection, supremely happy,
thrilling to that accidental contact, paling at the narrow margins
whereby her hair escaped conferring on him a delirium. He could stand at
a window all day pretending interest in the monotonous hills and empty
sea, only that he might keep her there too and indulge himself upon
her eyes. They--so eager, deep, or busied with the matters of her
thoughts--were enough for a common happiness; a debauch of it was in the
contact of her arm.

And yet something in this complacence of hers bewildered him. Here, if
you please, was a woman who but the other night (as it were) was holding
clandestine meetings with Simon MacTaggart, and loving him to that
extent that she defied her father. She could not but know that this
foreigner had done his worst to injure her in the inner place of her
affections, and yet she was to him more friendly than she had been
before. Several times he was on the point of speaking on the subject.
Once, indeed, he made a playful allusion to the flautist of the bower
that was provocative of no more than a reddened cheek and an interlude
of silence. But tacitly the lover was a theme for strict avoidance. Not
even the Baron had a word to say on that, and they were numberless the
topics they discussed in this enforced sweet domesticity.

A curious household! How it found provisions in these days Mungo alone
could tell. The little man had his fishing-lines out continually, his
gun was to