He nodded gloomily.
"Do you mean that you are going to leave Mount Hope?" she asked slowly.
"Yes, to-night maybe."
Her glance no longer met his, but he was conscious that she had lost something of her serenity.
"Are you sorry, Elizabeth?" he ventured.
To pa.s.s mutely out of her life had suddenly seemed an impossibility, and his tenderness and yearning trembled in his voice. She answered obliquely, by asking:
"Must you go?"
"I want to get away from Mount Hope. I want to leave it all,--all but you, dear!" he said. "You haven"t answered me, Elizabeth; will you care?"
"I am sorry," she said slowly, and the light in her gray-blue eyes darkened.
She heard the sigh that wasted itself on his lips.
"I am glad you can say that,--I wish you would look up!" he said wistfully.
"Are you going to-night?" she questioned.
"Yes, but I am coming back. I shan"t find that you have forgotten me when I come, shall I, Elizabeth?"
She looked up quickly into his troubled face, and it was not the warm firelight that brought the rich color in a sudden flame to her cheeks.
"I shall not forget you."
There was a determined gentleness in her speech and manner that gave him courage.
"I haven"t any right to talk to you in this way; I know I haven"t, but--Oh, I want you, Elizabeth!" And all at once he was on his knees beside her, his arms about her. "Don"t forget me, dear! I love you, I Love you--I want you--Oh, I want you for my wife!"
The girl looked into the pa.s.sionate face upturned to hers, and then her head drooped. And so they remained long; his dark head resting in her arms; her fair face against it.
"Why do you go, John?" she asked at length, out of the rich content of their silence.
"I haven"t any choice, dear heart; there isn"t any place for me here. I have thought it all over, and I know I am doing the wise thing,--I am quite sure of this! I shall write you of everything that concerns me!"
he added hastily, as he heard the tread of the general"s slippered feet in the hall.
North released her hands as the general entered the room. Elizabeth sank back in her chair. Her father glanced sharply at them, and North turned toward him frankly.
"I am leaving on the midnight train, General, and I must say good-by; I have to get a few things together for my trip!"
General Herbert glanced again at Elizabeth, but her face was averted and he learned nothing from its expression.
"So you are going away! Well, North, I hope you will have a pleasant trip,--better let me send you into town?"
And he reached for the bell-rope. North shook his head.
"I"ll walk, thank you," he said briefly.
In silence he turned to Elizabeth and held out his hand. For an instant she rested hers in it, a cold little hand that trembled; their eyes met in a brief glance of perfect understanding, and then North turned from her. The general followed him into the hall.
"It"s stopped snowing, and you will have clear starlight for your walk home,--the wind"s gone down, too!" he said, as he opened the hall door.
"Don"t come any farther, General Herbert!" said North.
But the general followed him into the stone arched vestibule.
"It"s a fine night for your walk,--but you"re quite sure you don"t want to be driven into town?"
"No, no,--good night." And North held out his hand.
"Good night."
North went down the carriageway, and Herbert reentered the house.
North kept to the beaten path for a little while, then left it and tramped out across the fields until he came to a strip of woodland that grew along a stony hillside. He followed this ridge back a short distance and presently emerged upon a sloping meadow that overhung a narrow ravine. Not two hundred yards distant loomed Idle Hour, somber and dark and ma.s.sive. He found a stump on the edge of the woods and brushed the snow from it, then drawing his overcoat closely about him, he sat down and lit his pipe.
The windows of Idle Hour still showed their many lights. At his feet a thread-like stream, swollen by the recent rains, splashed and murmured ceaselessly. He sat there a long time silent and absorbed, watching the lights, until at last they vanished from the drawing-room and the library. Then other lights appeared behind curtained windows on the second floor. These in their turn were extinguished, and Idle Hour sank deeper into the shadows as the crescent moon slipped behind the horizon.
"G.o.d bless her!" North said aloud.
He knocked the ashes from his pipe, and retraced his steps to the drive.
He had but turned from this into the public road when he heard the clatter of wheels and the beat of hoofs, and a rapidly driven team swung around a bend in the road in front of him. He stepped aside to let it pa.s.s, but the driver pulled up abreast of him with a loud command to his horses.
"Heard the news?" he asked, leaning out over the dash-board of his buggy.
"What news?" asked North.
"Oh, I guess you haven"t heard!" said the stranger. "Well, old man McBride, the hardware merchant, is dead! Murdered!"
"Murdered!" cried North.
"Yes, sir,--murdered! They found him in his store this evening a little after six. No one knows who did it. Well, good night, I thought maybe you"d like to know. Awful, ain"t it?"
CHAPTER EIGHT
A GAMBLER AT HOME
It was morning, and Mr. Gilmore sat by his cheerful open fire in that front room of his, where by night were supposed to flourish those games of chance which were such an offense to the "better element" in Mount Hope. Mr. Gilmore was hardly a person of unexceptional taste, though he had no suspicion of this fact, since he counted that room quite all that any gentleman"s parlor should be.
It was a large room furnished in dark velvet and heavy walnut. The red velvet curtains at the windows, when drawn at night, permitted no ray of light to escape; the carpet was a gorgeous Brussels affair, the like of which both as to cost and enduring splendor was not to be found elsewhere on any floor in Mount Hope. Seated as he then was, Gilmore could look, if so disposed, at the reflection of his own dark but not unhandsome face in a ma.s.sive gilt-framed mirror that reached from chimneypiece to ceiling; or, glancing about the room, his eyes could dwell with genuine artistic pleasure on numerous copies in crayon of French figure-studies; nor were the like of these to be found elsewhere in Mount Hope.