that
promise given to a dead man; in the nobility of its refusal to shine
brighter in its faith and truth and chivalry by the revelation of that
other man's mean baseness; in its almost paternal solicitude; in its agony
of love for her, insensible and careless; in the sick despair that had
given up and left off hoping: even in the pride that had--or so it seemed
to her--asserted itself at the last, and said, "I have left off crying for
the moon; I wish for your love no longer!"--it pleaded--pleaded.... Words
struggled for answering utterance in her, but none came.... She leaned
nearer, drawn by an irresistible fascination, and laid her lips lightly
upon the broad white forehead, with the bar of black meeting eyebrow
smudged across it, and then, with a sudden leap and thrill, she knew....

All that had been in the past went for nothing. Only this man mattered who
sat sleeping in the chair. How easy to awaken him with a touch, and tell
him all! She dared not, though she longed to.

He was her master as well as her mate. When he had said to her that he had
ceased to care, his eyes had given his words the lie. He had looked at
her.... She shivered deliciously at the recollection of that look. If he
were to open those stern, ardent eyes now, he would know her his. His--all
his, to deal with as he chose!... His alone!

If Saxham had awakened then.... But he slept on. She did not dare to kiss
that broad white buckler of his forehead again. She kissed the sleeve of
his coat instead, and, scared by a sudden sigh and movement of one of the
hands that hung over the chair-arms, gathered her draperies around her,
and stole as noiselessly as a pale sunbeam, out of the room.

LXVII

It was barely five o'clock, and the balmiest summer day at Herion is wont
to waken, like a spoilt child, in a bad temper of angry wind and lashing
rain. Lynette, who had risen from her bed and thrown her dressing-gown
about her, to kneel on the broad window-seat and look out upon this
strange new world, shivered, standing barefoot on the mossy carpet. Then
she looked round the room, and smiled with delight. For she had found it,
upon her arrival of the previous night, a reproduction, down to the
smallest detail, of her blue-and-white bedroom at Harley Street, with this
notable difference--that on the wall facing the bed-head hung a fine copy
of a Millais portrait that was one of the treasures of Bawne House. Lady
Bridget-Mary, in the glory of h