CHAPTER XI.

Leonard entered on the scene, and joined the party in the garden. The
countess, perhaps to please her son, was more than civil,--she was
markedly kind to him. She noticed him more attentively than she had
hitherto done; and, with all her prejudices of birth, was struck to find
the son of Mark Fairfield the carpenter so thoroughly the gentleman. He
might not have the exact tone and phrase by which Convention stereotypes
those born and schooled in a certain world; but the aristocrats of Nature
can dispense with such trite minutia? And Leonard had lived, of late at
least, in the best society that exists for the polish of language and the
refinement of manners,--the society in which the most graceful ideas are
clothed in the most graceful forms; the society which really, though
indirectly, gives the law to courts; the society of the most classic
authors, in the various ages in which literature has flowered forth from
civilization. And if there was something in the exquisite sweetness of
Leonard's voice, look, and manner, which the countess acknowledged to
attain that perfection in high breeding, which, under the name of
"suavity," steals its way into the heart, so her interest in him was
aroused by a certain subdued melancholy which is rarely without
distinction, and never without charm. He and Helen exchanged but few
words. There was but one occasion in which they could have spoken apart,
and Helen herself contrived to elude it. His face brightened at Lady
Lansmere's cordial invitation, and he glanced at Helen as he accepted it;
but her eye did not meet his own.