Lord Musselburgh dined with them that evening, and remained some time after the other guests had gone. To Vincent it seemed a puzzling thing that two betrothed people should make so merry. They appeared so well content with their present estate; they were so assured as to the future; no anxieties; no conflicting hopes and fears; they were in the happiest mood. Next morning, too, Lord Musselburgh again made his appearance; and the three of them went out for a stroll along the promenade. All the world was shining fair and clear; Mrs. Ellison was looking her best, and seemed to know it; her fiancé was in a gay humour. Why, they were almost like the ’lover and his lass’ of whom Thomas Morley sang nigh three hundred years ago—those ’pretty country folks’ who lived in a perpetual spring-time, with birds singing hey-ding-a-ding-a-ding to them through all the jocund hours. The tall and elegant young widow blushed and laughed like a maid; her eyes were sarcastic, playful, amused, according to her varying mood; the sunlight touched her pretty brown hair. There was, indeed, a sort of audacity of comeliness about her, that set Vincent thinking of a very different kind of beauty—the beauty that seems to be dowered with a divine and angelic sadness. He was walking with these two; but he did not take part in their frolic talk; nor did he pay much attention to the crowd of people, the butterflies of fashion, who had come out into the pleasant sunshine. He seemed to see before him a face that, with all its youth, and its touch of colour, and its grace of outline, was strangely pensive and wistful. And again he asked himself, as many a time he had asked himself, what that expression meant: whether it had been brought there by experience of the many vicissitudes of life, or by loneliness, or whether it was not something more tragic still—the shadow of an impending fate. There was more than that he could not understand: her curious resignation, her hopelessness as to the future, her wish to get away. And what was it she had concealed from him? And why had she declared she could not ever be his wife? "You are very silent, Vin," his fair neighbour said, turning her merry eyes towards him at last. "Here is Lord Musselburgh declaring that if he were a Jew he would turn dentist, to have it out with the Christians for what they did in the Middle Ages. A horrid revenge, wouldn’t it be?—and so mean—under pretence of affording relief. Oh, look at that girl over there—I do believe the ruff is coming back—we shall all be Elizabethans by-and-by."