Once in the course of that day he left his post by the landau, and went for a solitary ramble; not amongst the tents, where black-eyed Bohemians saluted him as "my pretty gentleman," or the knock-'em-downs and weighing-machines, or the bucolic babble of the ring, but away across the grassy slope, turning his back upon the racecourse. He wanted to think it out again, in his own phrase, just as he had thought it out the day before in the library at Hale.
"I am afraid I am getting too fond of her," he said to himself. "It's the old story: just like dram-drinking. I take the pledge, and then go and drink again. I am the weakest of mankind. But it cannot make very much difference. She knows I am engaged--and--Lady Laura is right. The sooner the marriage comes off, the better. I shall never be safe till the knot is tied; and then duty, honour, feeling, and a dozen other motives, will hold me to the right course."
He strolled back to his party only a little time before the horses were put in, and on this occasion went straight to the phaeton, and devoted himself to Lady Laura.
"You are going to drive me home, of course?" he said. "I mean to claim my place."
"I hardly think you have any right to it, after your desertion of me. You have been flirting with those girls in the landau all day."
"Flirting is one of the melancholy privileges of my condition. An engaged man enjoys an immunity in that matter. When a criminal is condemned to death, they give him whatever he likes to eat, you know. It is almost the same kind of thing."
He took his place in the phaeton presently, and talked gaily enough all the way home, in that particular strain required to match my lady's agreeable rattle; but he had a vague sense of uneasiness lurking somewhere in his mind, a half-consciousness that he was drifting the wrong way.
All that evening he was especially attentive to Lady Geraldine, whose headache had left her with a pale and pensive look which was not without its charm. The stately beauty had a softer air, the brightness of the blue eyes was not so cold as it was wont to be. They played chess again, and Mr. Fairfax kept aloof from Clarissa. They walked together in the gardens for a couple of hours next morning; and George Fairfax pressed the question of his marriage with such a show of earnestness and warmth, that Geraldine's rebellious pride was at once solaced and subdued, and she consented to agree to any arrangement he and Lady Laura might make.