Page:Between Two Loves.djvu/127

122 Jonathan watched his daughter closely as she stood on the rug of skins with one foot on the stone fender, and the blazing fire throwing fitful lights and shadows over her beautiful face and tall, black-robed figure. There was a pathos and languor about her which he had never noticed before, and which might be the result of her sickness and her mourning dress, or might spring from a heart weary with contention, accepting a fate which it deprecated, but could no longer resist.

"But I'll not meddle nor make in Aske's affairs," he thought, as he was driven rapidly home. "I'll not say to Eleanor, 'Is ta happy?' or 'Is ta no happy?' I'll never put a question to her. She looked sad enough, but then a women that hes lost her first baby can't look as if she hed it in her arms. It isn't to be expected."

He thought it best, upon the whole, not to go too often to Aske Hall, and to make his visits there at those ceremonial dinners when there was much company, and its domestic life was hid behind its social obligations. But Jonathan knew his daughter's peculiarities, and even in the atmosphere of feasting, and amid the ripple