"What, love?" whispered Algernon, kissing her cheek.

"Nothing, dearest, nothing."

At that instant, the deer, which lay waving their lordly antlers to
and fro beneath the avenue which sloped upward from the stream to the
house, rose hurriedly and in confusion, and stood gazing, with
watchful eyes, upon a man advancing towards the pair.

It was one of the servants with a letter. Isabel saw a faint change
(which none else could have seen) in Mordaunt's countenance, as he
recognized the writing and broke the seal. When he had read the
letter, his eyes fell upon the ground, and then, with a slight start,
he lifted them up, and gazed long and eagerly around. Wistfully did
he drink, as it were, into his heart the beautiful and expanded scene
which lay stretched on either side; the noble avenue which his
forefathers had planted as a shelter to their sons, and which now in
its majestic growth and its waving boughs seemed to say, "Lo! ye are
repaid!" and the never silent and silver stream, by which his boyhood
had sat for hours, lulled by its music, and inhaling the fragrance of
the reed and wild flower that decoyed the bee to its glossy banks; and
the deer, to whose melancholy belling be had listened so often in the
gray twilight with a rapt and dreaming ear; and the green fern waving
on the gentle hill, from whose shade his young feet had startled the
hare and the infant fawn; and far and faintly gleaming through the
thick trees, which clasped it as with a girdle, the old Hall, so
associated with vague hopes and musing dreams, and the dim legends of
gone time, and the lofty prejudices of ancestral pride,--all seemed to
sink within him, as he gazed, like the last looks of departing
friends; and when Isabel, who had not dared to break a silence which