Again, had he been in love with her himself, I fancy that the tender
passion would, with him, have been so vague and feeble a sentiment that
he might have gone down to his grave with a dim sense of some uneasy
sensation which might be love or indigestion, and with, beyond this, no
knowledge whatever of his state.

So it was not the least use, my poor Alicia, to ride about the lanes
around Audley during those three days which the two young men spent in
Essex; it was wasted trouble to wear that pretty cavalier hat and plume,
and to be always, by the most singular of chances, meeting Robert and
his friend. The black curls (nothing like Lady Audley's feathery
ringlets, but heavy clustering locks, that clung about your slender
brown throat), the red and pouting lips, the nose inclined to be
_retrousse_, the dark complexion, with its bright crimson flush, always
ready to glance up like a signal light in a dusky sky, when you came
suddenly upon your apathetic cousin--all this coquettish _espiegle_,
brunette beauty was thrown away upon the dull eyes of Robert Audley, and
you might as well have taken your rest in the cool drawing-room at the
Court, instead of working your pretty mare to death under the hot
September sun.

Now fishing, except to the devoted disciple of Izaak Walton, is not the
most lively of occupations; therefore, it is scarcely, perhaps, to be
wondered that on the day after Lady Audley's departure, the two young
men (one of whom was disabled by that heart wound which he bore so
quietly, from really taking pleasure in anything, and the other of whom
looked upon almost all pleasure as a negative kind of trouble) began to
grow weary of the shade of the willows overhanging the winding streams
about Audley.