Eleanor by Mary Augusta Ward Page B

it—thinking all the time with a vague misery of Lucy Foster’s untouched bloom.
    Then her eyes fell upon two photographs that stood upon her table. One represented a man in yeomanry uniform; the other a tottering child of two.
    ‘Oh! my boy—my darling!’—she cried in a stifled agony, and snatching up the picture, she bowed her head upon it, kissing it. The touch of it calmed her. But she could not part from it. She put it in her breast, and when she slept, it was still there.
    CHAPTER III
    ‘Eleanor—where are you off to?’
    ‘Just to my house of Simmon,’ said that lady, smiling. She was standing on the eastern balcony, buttoning a dainty grey glove, while Manisty a few paces from her was lounging in a deck-chair, with the English newspapers.
    ‘What?—to mass? I protest. Look at the lake—look at the sky—look at that patch of broom on the lake side. Come and walk there before
dejeuner
—and make a round home by Aricia.’
    Mrs. Burgoyne shook her head.
    ‘No—I like my little idolatries,’ she said, with decision. It was Sunday morning. The bells in Marinata were ringing merrily. Women and girls with black lace scarves upon their heads, handsome young men in short coats and soft peaked hats, were passing along the road between the villa and the lake, on their way to mass. It was a warm April day. The clouds of yellow banksia, hanging over the statued wall that girdled the fountain-basin, were breaking into bloom; and the nightingales were singing with a prodigality that was hardly worthy of their rank and dignity. Nature in truth is too lavish of nightingales on the Alban Hills in spring! She forgets, as it were, her own sweet arts, and all that rareness adds to beauty. One may hear a nightingale and not mark him; which is a
lese majeste
.
    Mrs. Burgoyne’s toilette matched the morning. The grey dress, so fresh and elegant, the broad black hat above the fair hair, the violets dewy from the garden that were fastened at her slender waist, and again at her throat beneath the pallor of the face,—these things were of a perfection quite evident to the critical sense of Edward Manisty. It was the perfection that was characteristic. So too was the faded fairness of hair and skin, the frail distinguished look. So, above all, was the contrast between the minute care for personal adornment implied in the finish of the dress, and the melancholy shrinking of the dark-rimmed eyes.
    He watched her, through the smoke wreaths of his cigarette,—pleasantly and lazily conscious both of her charm and her inconsistencies.
    ‘Are you going to take Miss Foster?’ he asked her.
    Mrs. Burgoyne laughed.
    ‘I made the suggestion. She looked at me with amazement, coloured crimson, and went away. I have lost all my chances with her.’
    ‘Then she must be an ungrateful minx’—said Manisty, lowering his voice and looking round him towards the villa, ‘considering the pains you take.’
    ‘
Some
of us must take pains,’ said Mrs. Burgoyne, significantly.
    ‘Some of us do’—he said, laughing. ‘The others profit.—One goes on praying for the primitive,—but when it comes—No!—it is not permitted to be as typical as Miss Foster.’
    ‘Typical of what?’
    ‘The dissidence of Dissent, apparently—and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion. Confess:—it was an odd caprice on the part of high Jove to send her here?’
    ‘I am sure she has a noble character—and an excellent intelligence!’
    Manisty shrugged his shoulders.
    ‘—Her grandfather’—continued the lady—‘was a divinity professor and wrote a book on the Inquisition!’—
    Manisty repeated his gesture.
    ‘—And as I told you last night, she is almost as handsome as your Greek head—and very like her.’
    ‘My dear lady—you have the wildest notions!’
    Mrs. Burgoyne picked up her parasol.
    ‘Quite true.—Your aunt tells me she was so disappointed, poor child, that there was no church of her own sort for her to go to this