No one took much notice of Ursula Glynde, she was the disgraced maid-of-honour, the fallen star, scarce worth beholding, and she was glad of this isolation, which the selfishness of her former friends created around her. She looked for the last time upon the pomp and pageant of this glittering Court life; her very soul yearned for the peace and seclusion of austere convent walls. For the last time too she looked upon the man on whom she had lavished all the tenderness of her romantic temperament, whom she had set up on a pedestal of chivalry from which she felt loath even now to dethrone him.
She could see that he suffered and that he did not understand. The misunderstanding, which nothing could clear up now, still made a veil of darkness before his eyes. Her tender heart ached for him, her soul went out to him amidst all these people who laughed and chatted around her. For one brief moment their eyes met across a sea of indifferent faces--his lighted up with all the ardour of a never-fading passionate love, and hers spoke to him an eternal farewell.
A few moments later the whole gay and giddy throng, like a flight of brilliantly hued butterflies, had fluttered out into the garden.
The wintry sun was bestowing its last cold kiss on the terraces and bosquets of the park. Beyond, the landscape--wrapped in a delicate haze of purple--was gently swooning in the arms of this November afternoon. All bird-song was silent, save the harsh chirrup of aggressive sparrows and the occasional brisk note of an irrepressible robin.
Close by the fountain a strange, dull group moved about somewhat listlessly--men and women, a dozen or so, in faded or ragged worsted mantles, shoes through which the flesh appeared, and mud-stained, bedraggled hose. Truly a wondrous spectacle on the delicately gravelled paths of the regal residence! a remarkable picture against the majestic background of carefully trimmed hedges, or conventional, well-cared-for shrubberies.
They looked indifferently round them, these poor shreds of society--the happy recipients of unlooked-for royal bounty. There were all sorts and conditions of men and women here, from the wrinkly-visaged hag who plied a precarious trade in illicit goods, to the hardened, sullen lout who made of Her Majesty's prisons an habitual home. A vagrant too here and there--one boy, barely in his teens, with pinched, haggard features, on which starvation had already scribbled her ugly name; a young girl, with bold, dark eyes, and coarse face masked with glaring cosmetics; and, far in the remote background, a huddled-up figure of a woman in tawdry finery, with a torn, bedraggled white dress ill concealing her naked shoulders, a few scraps of faded ivy-leaves still clinging to her bright-hued, matted hair.