“Oh!” said Margaret. She watched him with her head a little on one side, her lips just parted with eagerness and interest, her brown eyes all aglow. Sometimes her hand would touch his shoulder as she leaned more and more over him; her breath moved the hair on his temples, and went through and through the young man. And he was very open to this kind of influence. It did not require any mercenary hopes, any dazzling realization of an heiress, to send him into all the seductive beguilements of the love-dream. Jeanie had done it with her simple rural attractions--how much more her young mistress, with a whole romance about her, and so many charms, both visionary and real! Rob was not a fortune-hunter, bent on an heiress. This was what his mother would have had him to be; but his nature was too susceptible for such a cold-blooded pursuit. He did what was far better, infinitely more likely to succeed, a greater stroke of genius than any skill of fortune-hunting--he fell simply over head and ears in love. He had done it before many times; it was not the intense and real passion which now and then carries a man out of himself, the love that has no room in its heart for more than one image. But still it was what he knew as that sentiment; and it was quite genuine. A little mist came into Rob’s eyes, through which he saw Sir Ludovic in his chair, the task he had set before him; his heart beat in his ears, a soft confusion and excitement seized him. He did not know what he was doing, as he sat there with Margaret looking over his shoulder. His experiences before of this same kind had been pleasant enough, but none of them had possessed the charm, the sweetness of this. Not only was she more charming than any of his former loves, but he himself was vaguely raised and elevated as to another sphere of being. In the dazzlement and tremor of the new crisis, the gratification of his vanity and self-regard, he seemed to himself only now to have attained his true sphere. “Oh, how wonderful it is!” said Margaret; “two or three strokes with a lead-pencil, and there is papa! This is more wonderful than the views. Now his hand, Mr. Glen. How sleeping it is on the chair! You could tell he was sleeping only from the look of his hand. Hasn’t he a beautiful hand? I never saw one like it. My sister Jean’s is white, with dimples in it; they say she has a pretty hand; but then she has so many rings, and she never forgets them. But papa’s hand is beautiful, I think. Did you ever see one so fine? It has bones in it, but Jean’s has no bones. It is like himself in little. Don’t you think so, Mr. Glen?” “You forget how little I know Sir Ludovic. I have not seen him since I was a boy. But very often the hand is like the owner of it, in little, as you say. Your own is, I have noticed that.” “Mine?” Margaret raised the hand referred to, and looked at it, then laughed softly. “Mine is a brown thin thing, all fingers.” “May I stop to look at it?” said Rob.