‘That’s dreadful. Yet I must face the gorgon. I am dying to see Lina.’ ‘Naturally; and she will be enraptured at your return,’ answered Daphne in her most natural manner. ‘She has been expecting you every day i’ the hour.’ ‘“For in a minute there are many days”—Shakespeare.’ ‘Thank God! I don’t object to the bard of Avon half so strongly now. I have been in a country where everybody quotes an uncouth rhymester whom they call Bobbie Bairrns. Shakespeare seems almost civilised in comparison. Will you walk up to the house with me?’ She looked down at her open book. She had not been reading when he came unawares upon her solitude. He had seen that; just as surely as he had seen the faint convulsive movement of her throat, the start, the pallor that marked her surprise at his approach. He had acquired a fatal habit of watching and analysing her emotions; and it seemed to him that she had brightened since his coming, that new light and colour had returned to her face; almost as you may see the revival of a flower that has drooped in the drought, and which revivifies under the gentle summer rain. She looked at her book doubtfully, as if she would like to say no. ‘You had better come with me. It is nearly tea-time, and I know you are dying for a cup of tea. I never knew a woman that wasn’t.’ ‘Exhausted nature tells me that it is tea-time. Yes; I suppose I had better come.’ CHAPTER XVIII. ‘LOVE WOL NOT BE CONSTREINED BY MAISTRIE.’ A man who lives within easy reach of two good packs of fox-hounds, and in a fair hunting country on the very edge of the shires, can hardly mope, albeit he may feel that, in a general way, his heart is broken. Thus it was with Edgar Turchill, who hunted four days a week, and came to South Hill on the off-days to suffer and enjoy all those hot fits and cold fits, those desperate delights plucked from the jaws of pain, which a man feels when he adores a girl who does not care a straw for him. He had been rejected, even with contumely, as it seemed to him: yet so dearly did he delight in Daphne’s society that if he were destined never to win her for his own, the next best blessing he asked from Fate was to be allowed to dangle about her for ever—to fetch and carry, to be snubbed, and laughed at, and patronised, as it pleased her wilful humour. The autumn and early winter were mild—a capital season for hunting. ‘What selfish creatures you sporting men are!’ cried Daphne one morning, looking gloomily out at the gloomy November day; ‘so long as you can go galloping over the muggy fields after innocent foxes you don’t care how dreary the world is for other people. We want a hard frost, for then we might have some skating on the pond. I wish the Avon would freeze, so that we could skate to Tewkesbury.’ ‘I daresay we shall have plenty of hard weather in January,’ said Edgar apologetically. It was one of his off-days, and he had ridden over to South Hill directly after luncheon. ‘You ought to hunt, Daphne.’