Neither your mother nor mine had any right to try to bind us. Such
things never answer, never prosper. I cannot myself imagine how they,
usually so sensible, came in this instance to disregard all dictates of
common sense. I have always looked upon the arrangement as mere
nonsense; and I hope you have done the same. You are free as air--and so
am I."

She made no answer, but, after a few minutes, when she had regained her
self-possession, she said:

"The sun is warm on the water--I think we had better return;" and, as
they went back, she spoke to him carelessly about the new rage for
garden-parties.

"Does she care or not?" thought Lord Arleigh to himself. "Is she pleased
or not? I cannot tell; the ways of women are inscrutable. Yet a strange
idea haunts me--an uncomfortable suspicion."

As he watched her, there seemed to him no trace of anything but
light-hearted mirth and happiness about her. She laughed and talked; she
was the center of attraction, the life of the _fête_. When he spoke to
her, she had a careless jest, a laughing word for him; yet he could not
divest himself of the idea that there was something behind all this. Was
it his fancy, or did the dark eyes wear every now and then an expression
of anguish? Was it his fancy, or did it really happen that when she
believed herself unobserved, the light died out of her face?

He was uncomfortable, without knowing why--haunted by a vague, miserable
suspicion he could not explain, by a presentiment he could not
understand--compelled against his will to watch her, yet unable to