With Ethel, although she did not know it, it was love that whispered love’s secret to her heart. She heard the whisper but failed to recognise the voice. Only a little while before she had been sorely smitten, and not yet had she quite recovered from the blow; although every day that took her farther away from it helped almost imperceptibly to blunt the sharp edge of pain. A consciousness had begun to dawn on her that within her heart, dormant as yet, or only just beginning timidly to unfold, lay the potentialities of a love very different from that which her ignorance had been beguiled into accepting as the “perfect flower of life.” Already for her the morn of a new and more beautiful love was beginning to break, before the sweetness and light of which all that was left in her memory of the deposed image of Launce Keymer would fade and crumble into nothingness. CHAPTER XXXVI. A DEED OF DARKNESS It was late in the afternoon when Captain Verinder and his nephew arrived at Withington Chase. Under the circumstances, Sir Gilbert could not well do otherwise than invite the Captain to dine and sleep there, and when Verinder, although secretly overjoyed, pleaded that his dress clothes were in his portmanteau at the cloakroom of the London terminus, his excuse was at once overruled. “If that is your only objection, sir, you shall be kept in countenance by my grandson and myself. For once in a way we will all wear tweeds at dinner.” Retaining Luigi’s hand in his for a few seconds, Sir Gilbert gazed somewhat wistfully into the young man’s face. “You have not brought back much of the tan of travel on your cheeks,” he said. “How is that, I wonder? Not for years have we had so hot an autumn as the one now drawing to a close.” “My face never either tans or freckles, sir, however hot the weather may be,” explained Luigi with a touch of heightened colour. “It is a fact for which I am unable to account.” “Humph! At all events I’m glad to see that your cheeks can take a blush. I am glad, too, judging from your letters, that you seem to have enjoyed yourself while away, although that was by no means the object I had in view in sending you abroad. I trust that your experiences during the last month will not be thrown away upon you, but that they will be productive of benefit to you in more ways than one.” With that he turned away, murmuring to himself: “What can be the reason why he never looks me straight in the face? Why do his eyes always flicker and drop when I try to fix them with my own? It is a bad trait, a very bad trait, and it fills me with a vague sense of mistrust. If he would but confront me with Lisle’s open unflinching look! That young fellow’s eyes are as clear and honest as the day.”