"No," he said, simply, "I came back. I did not like to think that you should come alone." Stella was silent. "Are you angry?" he asked, in a low voice. Stella was silent for a moment, then she looked at him frankly. "No," she said. If she had but said "yes," and turned back! But the path, all beautiful with the bright coloring of Spring stretched before her, and she had no thought of turning back, no thought or suspicion of the dark and perilous land toward which she was traveling by his side. Already the glamour of love was falling upon her like the soft mist of a Summer evening; blindly, passively she was moving toward the fate which the gods had prepared for her. CHAPTER VII. Side by side they walked across the meadows; the larks rising before them and soaring up to the heavens with a burst of song; the river running in silvery silence to the sea; the green trees waving gently in the Summer breeze; and above them the long stretching gray masonry of Wyndward Hall. Lord Leycester was strangely silent for some minutes since that "Are you angry?" and Stella, as she walked by his side, stooping now and again to gather a cowslip, glanced up at his face and wondered whether her uncle could be mistaken, whether they were not all deceived in thinking the quiet, graceful creature with the beautiful face and dreamy, almost womanly, soft eyes, wild and reckless, and desperate and altogether bad. She almost forgot how she had seen him on that first night of their meeting, with his whip upraised and the sudden fire of anger in his eyes. Presently he spoke, so suddenly that Stella, who had been lost in her speculations respecting him, started guiltily: "I have been wondering," he said, "how Mr. Etheridge takes the change which your presence must make in the cottage." Stella looked up with surprise, then she smiled. "He bears it with admirable resignation," she said, with that air of meek archness which her uncle found so amusing. Lord Leycester looked down at her. "That is a rebuke for the presumption of my remark?" he said. "No," said Stella. "I did not mean to be presumptuous. Think. Your uncle has lived the whole of his life alone, the life of a solitary, a hermit; suddenly there enters into that life a young and beau--a young girl, full of the spirit of youth and its aspirations. It must make a great change." "As I said," says Stella, "he bears it with pious fortitude." Then she added, in a lower voice, "He is very good to me." "He could not be otherwise," was the quiet response. "I mean that he could not be anything but good, gentle, and loving with any living thing. I have known him since I was a boy," he added. "He was always the same, always living a life of dreams. I wonder whether he takes you as a dream?" "A very substantial and responsible one, then," said Stella, with her little laugh. "One that lasts through the daytime." He looked at her with that strange intent look which she had learned that she could not meet.