"It's day already!" he said with assumed vivacity, throwing open the
shutters, and displaying the young light on the lawn.

Lady Blandish dried her tears as she knelt, and then joined him, and
glanced up silently at Richard's moon standing in wane toward the West.
She hoped it was because of her having been premature in pleading so
earnestly, that she had failed to move him, and she accused herself more
than the baronet. But in acting as she had done, she had treated him as
no common man, and she was compelled to perceive that his heart was at
present hardly superior to the hearts of ordinary men, however composed
his face might be, and apparently serene his wisdom. From that moment
she grew critical of him, and began to study her idol--a process
dangerous to idols. He, now that she seemed to have relinquished the
painful subject, drew to her, and as one who wished to smooth a foregone
roughness, murmured: "God's rarest blessing is, after all, a good woman!
My Emmeline bears her sleepless night well. She does not shame the day."
He gazed down on her with a fondling tenderness.

"I could bear many, many!" she replied, meeting his eyes, "and you would
see me look better and better, if...if only..." but she had no
encouragement to end the sentence.

Perhaps he wanted some mute form of consolation; perhaps the handsome
placid features of the dark-eyed dame touched him: at any rate their
Platonism was advanced by his putting an arm about her. She felt the arm
and talked of the morning.

Thus proximate, they by and by both heard something very like a groan
behind them, and looking round, beheld the Saurian eye. Lady Blandish