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“He is a Mr. Audley, a friend of my poor brother’s.”

“Indeed! He is some relation of Sir Michael Audley, I suppose?”

“Sir Michael Audley!”

“Yes, my dear; the most important personage in the parish of Audley. But we’ll call at the Court in a day or two, and you shall see the baronet and his pretty young wife.”

“His young wife!” replied Clara Talboys, looking earnestly at her friend. “Has Sir Michael Audley lately married, then?”

“Yes. He was a widower for sixteen years, and married a penniless young governess about a year and a half ago. The story is quite romantic, and Lady Audley is considered the belle of the county. But come, my dear Clara, the pony is tired of waiting for us, and we’ve a long drive before dinner.”

Clara Talboys took her seat in the little basket-carriage which was waiting at the principal gate of the churchyard, in the care of the boy who had blown the organ-bellows. Mrs. Martyn shook the reins, and the sturdy chestnut cob trotted off in the direction of Mount Stanning.

“Will you tell me more about this Lady Audley, Fanny?” Miss Talboys said, after a long pause. “I want to know all about her. Have you heard her maiden name?”

“Yes; she was a Miss Graham.”

“And she is very pretty?”

“Yes, very, very pretty. Rather a childish beauty though, with large, clear blue eyes, and pale golden ringlets, that fall in a feathery shower over her throat and shoulders.”

Clara Talboys was silent. She did not ask any further questions about my lady.

She was thinking of a passage in that letter which George had written to her during his honeymoon—a passage in which he said: “My childish little wife is watching me as I write this—Ah! how I wish you could see her, Clara! Her eyes are as blue and as clear as the skies on a bright summer’s day, and her hair falls about her face like the pale golden halo you see round the head of a Madonna in an Italian picture.”

CHAPTER XXIX

IN THE LIME-WALK

Robert Audley was loitering upon the broad grass-plat in front of the Court as the carriage containing my lady and Alicia drove under the archway, and drew up at the low turret-door. Mr. Audley presented himself in time to hand the ladies out of the vehicle.

My lady looked very pretty in a delicate blue bonnet and the sables which her nephew had bought for her at St. Petersburg. She seemed very well pleased to see Robert, and smiled most bewitchingly as she gave him her exquisitely gloved little hand.

“So you have come back to us, truant?” she said, laughing. “And now that you have returned, we shall keep you prisoner. We won’t let him run away again, will we, Alicia?”

Miss Audley gave her head a scornful toss that shook the heavy curls under her cavalier hat.

“I have nothing to do with the movements of so erratic an individual,” she said. “Since Robert Audley has taken it into his head to conduct himself like some ghost-haunted hero in a German story, I have given up attempting to understand him.”

Mr. Audley looked at his cousin with an expression of serio-comic perplexity. “She’s a nice girl,” he thought, “but she’s a nuisance. I don’t know how it is, but she seems more a nuisance than she used to be.”

He pulled his mustaches reflectively as he considered this question. His mind wandered away for a few moments from the great trouble of his life to dwell upon this minor perplexity.

“She’s a dear girl,” he thought; “a generous-hearted, bouncing, noble English lassie; and yet—” He lost himself in a quagmire of doubt and difficulty. There was some hitch in his mind which he could not understand; some change in himself, beyond the change made in him by his anxiety about George Talboys, which mystified and bewildered him.

“And pray where have you been wandering during the last day or two, Mr. Audley?” asked my lady, as she lingered with her step-daughter upon the threshold of the turret-door, waiting until Robert should be pleased to stand aside and allow them to pass. The young man started as she asked this question and looked up at her suddenly. Something in the aspect of her bright young beauty, something in the childish innocence of her expression, seemed to smite him to the heart, and his face grew ghastly pale as he looked at her.