The gardens were not crowded; there were seldom visitors enough at the hotel to form a crowd; but Hyacinth was struck by the pleasant, high-bred faces and elegant dresses.
"Do you see that lady there in the gray dress," said Mr. Darcy--"the one with two children by her side?" Hyacinth looked in the direction indicated.
"That is the Princess Von Arten, the daughter of a queen. How simple and unassuming she is! She is staying here with her children. The gentleman now saluting her is the eminent Weilmath."
"I am glad to have seen him," she said; "I have read of him so often. Do you admire him?"
"I admire bravery," he replied, "but not unscrupulous daring. Do you see that lady sitting under the ilex tree?"
"The one with the sad, thoughtful face?" asked Hyacinth.
"Yes. Twelve months ago she was the leading star of the most brilliant court in Europe; now she has no home that she can call her own."
"Mr. Darcy," she said, "is the world then so full of reverses? I thought that, when one was happy and prosperous, sorrow and trouble did not approach. What is stable if money, and friendship, and happiness fail?"
"Just one thing," he replied, with the beautiful luminous smile she had never seen on any other face--"Heaven!"
Hyacinth Vaughan repeated one sentence over and over again to herself--they were always the same words--"Thank Heaven, Adrian does not know what I have done."
For, as the days passed on, she learned to care for him with a love that was wonderful in its intensity. It was not his personal beauty that impressed her. By many people Claude Lennox would have been considered the handsomer man of the two. It was the grandeur of Adrian Darcy's character, the loyalty and nobility of his most loyal soul; the beauty of his mind, the stretch and clearness of his intellect, that charmed her.
She had never met any one like him--never met so perfect a mixture of chivalry and strength. She learned to have the utmost reliance upon him. His most lightly spoken word was to her as the oath of another. She saw that every thought, every word, every action of his was so perfectly correct that his least judgment was invaluable. If he said a thing was right, the whole world could not have made her think it wrong; if he disapproved of anything, so entire was her reliance upon him, that she could not be brought to consider it right.