"It is not for me to blame you, Mr. Audley," he said, "for having smuggled this guilty woman out of the reach of justice, and thus, as I may say, paltered with the laws of your country. I can only remark that, had the lady fallen into my hands, she would have been very differently treated."
It was in the middle of April when Robert Audley found himself once more under those black fir-trees beneath which his wandering thoughts had so often stayed since his first meeting with Clara Talboys. There were primroses and early violets in the hedges now, and the streams, which, upon his first visit, had been hard and frost-bound as the heart of Harcourt Talboys, had thawed, like that gentleman, and ran merrily under the blackthorn bushes in the capricious April sunshine.
Robert had a prim bedroom, and an uncompromising dressing-room allotted him in the square house, and he woke every morning upon a metallic spring mattress, which always gave him the idea of sleeping upon some musical instrument, to see the sun glaring in upon him through the square, white blinds and lighting up the two lackered urns which adorned the foot of the blue iron bedstead, until they blazed like two tiny brazen lamps of the Roman period. He emulated Mr. Harcourt Talboys in the matter of shower-baths and cold water, and emerged prim and blue as that gentleman himself, as the clock in the hall struck seven, to join the master of the house in his ante-breakfast constitutional under the fir-trees in the stiff plantation.
But there was generally a third person who assisted in the constitutional promenades, and that third person was Clara Talboys, who used to walk by her father's side, more beautiful than the morning--for that was sometimes dull and cloudy, while she was always fresh and bright--in a broad-leaved straw-hat and flapping blue ribbons, one quarter of an inch of which Mr. Audley would have esteemed a prouder decoration than ever adorned a favored creature's button-hole.
At first they were very ceremonious toward each other, and were only familiar and friendly upon the one subject of George's adventures; but little by little a pleasant intimacy arose between them, and before the first three weeks of Robert's visit had elapsed, Miss Talboys made him happy, by taking him seriously in hand and lecturing him on the purposeless life he had led so long, and the little use he had made of the talents and opportunities that had been given to him.
How pleasant it was to be lectured by the woman he loved! How pleasant it was to humiliate himself and depreciate himself before her! How delightful it was to get such splendid opportunities of hinting that if his life had been sanctified by an object he might indeed have striven to be something better than an idle flaneur upon the smooth pathways that have no particular goal; that, blessed by the ties which would have given a solemn purpose to every hour of his existence, he might indeed have fought the battle earnestly and unflinchingly. He generally wound up with a gloomy insinuation to the effect that it was only likely he would drop quietly over the edge of the Temple Gardens some afternoon when the river was bright and placid in the low sunlight, and the little children had gone home to their tea.