d.

So Mr. Hammond suddenly found out that he had seen all that was worth
seeing in the Lake country, and that there was nothing so enjoyable as
the placid idleness of Fellside; and at Fellside Lady Lesbia could not
always avoid him without a too-marked intention, so he tasted the
sweetness of her society to a much greater extent than was good for his
peace, if the case were indeed as hopeless as Lady Mary declared. He
strolled about the grounds with her; he drank the sweet melody of her
voice in Heine's tenderest ballads; he read to her on the sunlit lawn in
the lazy afternoon hours; he played billiards with her; he was her
faithful attendant at afternoon tea; he gave himself up to the study of
her character, which, to his charmed eyes, seemed the perfection of pure
and placid womanhood. There might, perhaps, be some lack of passion and
of force in this nature, a marked absence of that impulsive feeling
which is a charm in some women: but this want was atoned for by
sweetness of character, and Mr. Hammond argued that in these calm
natures there is often an unsuspected depth, a latent force, a grandeur
of soul, which only reveals itself in the great ordeals of life.

So John Hammond hung about the luxurious drawing-room at Fellside in a
manner which his friend Maulevrier ridiculed as unmanly.

'I had no idea you were such a tame cat,' he said: 'if when we were
salmon fishing in Canada anybody had told me you could loll about a
drawing-room all day listening to a girl squalling and reading novels, I
shouldn't have believed a word of it.'

'We had plenty of roughing on the shores of the St. Lawrence,' answered
Hammond. 'Summer idleness in a drawing-room is an agreeable variety.'

It is not to be supposed that John Hammond's state of mind could long
remain unperceived by the keen eyes of the dowager. She saw the gradual
dawning of his love, she saw the glow of its meridian. She was pleased
to behold this proof of Lesbia's power over the heart of man. So would
she conquer the man foredoomed to be her husband when the coming time
should bring them together. But agreeable as the fact of this first
conquest might be, as an evidence of Lesbia's supremacy among women, the
situation was not without its peril; and Lady Maulevrier felt that she
could no longer defer the duty of warning her granddaughter. She had
wished, if possible, to treat the thing lightly to the very last, so
that Lesbia should never know there had been dan