He could not resist the temptation to break in, with a touch of crude satire, upon his friend's solitude.
"What is the matter?" he exclaimed, "are you hungry?"
"No," said Robert, so well accustomed to such violent jars that they could no longer disturb him; "I was only thinking...."
Reckage turned pale from dissatisfied inquisitiveness.
"I think, too," he answered, "but I can throw out a word now and again."
Then, making the remark that he was not dressed for dinner, he left the room.
The dinner, in the ordering of which the host had expended all his gastronomical knowledge and much anxiety, seemed long. Orange found himself opposite the famous portrait of "Edwyn, Lord Reckage of Almouth," which represents that nobleman elaborately dressed, reclining on a grassy bank by a spring of water, with a wooded landscape, a sunrise, and a squire holding two horses in the distance. Robert studied, and remembered always, every detail of that singular composition. The warrior's shield, with its motto "_Magica sympathia_," his fat white hands, velvet breeches, steel cuirass, and stiff lace collar remained for days a grotesque image before his mind. He traced, too, a certain resemblance between Reckage and that ancestor--they both wore pointed red beards, both were fair of skin, both had a dreaming violence in their blue eyes.
"You must have some pheasant," said his lordship, at last. "You are eating nothing. And that Burgundy, you know, is unique of its kind. It was a present from the Emperor of the French to mamma. Her people were civil to him when he was regarded as a sort of adventurer. And he never forgot it. He's a very decent fellow. I dined with him at the Tuileries--did I mention it?"
Robert replied that he fancied he had heard of the occurrence.
"Well," continued his friend, "I might have enjoyed that experience, but I was feeling depressed at the time; a lot of the depression went under the influence of frivolous talk, military music, and champagne. Yet, all the same, do these things really count for much? I felt just as wretched afterwards."
The glimpse he had obtained that afternoon of Sara de Treverell--Sara flushed with agitation, very bright in her glance, exceedingly subtle in her smile, had stirred a great tenderness he had once felt for that young lady. The news, too, that she had been chosen as a bride by the prudent, rich, and most important Duke of Marshire made his lordship feel that perhaps he had committed a blunder in not having secured her, during her first season, for himself. He feared that he had lost an opportunity; and this reflection, while it lowered temporarily his self-esteem, placed Sara on a dangerous eminence. She would be a duchess--one of the great duchesses. Little Sara!