loved!"

"I bide my time," said Margrave; and as my eyes met his, I saw there a
look I had never seen in those eyes before, sinister, wrathful, menacing.
He turned away, went out through the sash-door of the study; and as he
passed towards the fields under the luxuriant chestnut-trees, I heard his
musical, barbaric chant,--the song by which the serpent-charmer charms the
serpent,--sweet, so sweet, the very birds on the boughs hushed their carol
as if to listen.

[1] See Sir Humphrey Davy on Heat, Light, and the Combinations of Light




CHAPTER XXX.

I called that day on Mrs. Poyntz, and communicated to her the purport of
the glad news I had received.

She was still at work on the everlasting knitting, her firm fingers
linking mesh into mesh as she listened; and when I had done, she laid her
skein deliberately down, and said, in her favourite characteristic
formula,--

"So at last?--that is settled!"

She rose and paced the room as men are apt to do in reflection, women
rarely need such movement to aid their thoughts; her eyes were fixed on
the floor, and one hand was lightly pressed on the palm of the other,--the