"And every day, since, he has come here. See, there are fresh wood-violets upon her breast. And the dear old man has never thought of such a thing as giving her a successor. Now, let us go. There are lambs to show you, and a lot of other things."
The passing cloud was gone from her April face. She was again radiant, and in some bedazzlement of mind he arose and followed her.
Townsend's acquaintance with his Virginia cousins had, as might have been expected, prolonged itself into a visit to Carlyle Hall; and he was on the eve of departure, after a stay of two weeks in that delightful refuge, before he realized how much his fancy had begun to twine around the place and its inmates.
Sentiment for the young creature who was its ruling spirit he did not admit, other than the natural tribute of his age and sex to hers. Nor did he give her credit for more than temporary feeling on any point disconnected with her strong local attachments. Her father, her home, and those she grandiosely called her "people"--meaning, he supposed, the individuals indebted to Providence for having been born within the limits of her State--were the objects of Eve's warm affection.
Vance felt sure her courteous thought of him was the result of only transmitted consideration for a guest. So soon as he should quit the pleasant precincts of the Hall, he feared he must put aside his claim to even this consideration. This condition of affairs worried our young man more than he cared to admit to himself. To no one else would he have confessed that the fortnight had been spent by him in a daily effort to impress upon her a personality widely different from her conception of it. Now, at the end of his enterprise, he was conscious that he had not advanced in the endeavor; and this last evening in her company was correspondingly depressing to his _amour propre_.
They were sitting together in a window-seat of the drawing-room, looking into an old-world garden with box walks, a sun-dial, and a blaze of tulips piercing the brown mold. From the western sky, facing them, the red light was vanishing, and in the large, dim room a couple of lamps made islands of radiance in a sea of shadows. In the library, adjoining, sat the Colonel, reading, his strong, handsome head seen in profile from where they were.