Page:Braddon--Wyllard's weird.djvu/67

Rh as young men are to girls they admire. He had said none of those pretty things which call up blushes in girlish cheeks; but he had been kind and brotherly, and Hilda was satisfied to accept such kindness from him. She thought it even more than her due. She was not what is called a high-spirited girl. She did not expect men to bow down and worship her; she did not expect that hearts were to be laid at her feet for her to trample upon them. She had none of the insolence of conscious beauty. If ever she were to love, it would be secretly, meekly, patiently, as Shakespeare's Helena loved Bertram, with a gentle upward-looking affection, deeming her lover remote and superior as a star.

There had been a time when she thought that Bothwell cared for her a little, and then he had been to her as Bertram. Now he was kind and brotherly, and she was grateful for his kindness.

She was somewhat heavy-hearted as she arranged her disordered hair—rumpled in a final game of romps with the twins—and put on her hat to go home. The donkey was waiting before the old stone porch, and Fräulein Meyerstein had come to assist in escorting the twins.

"I thought Minnie might be troublesome after tea," she said, as if tea had the effect of champagne upon Minnie's temperament.

They set out across the fields in the warm glow of evening sunlight, a little procession—the children full of talk and laughter, Hilda more silent than usual. It was harvest-time, and the corn stood in sheaves in one wide field by which they went, a field on the slope of a hill on the edge of the moorland. On the lower side of the field there was a tall overgrown hedge; a hedge full of the glow of sunshine and the colour of wild flowers, red and blue and yellow, an exuberance of starry golden flowers, scattered everywhere amidst the tangle of foliage.

There was a gap here and there in the hedge, where cattle or farm-labourers had made a way for themselves from field to field, and through one of these gaps a man scrambled, and jumped into the path just in front of the donkey.

The animal gave a feeble shy, and the twins screamed, first with surprise and then with pleasure. The man was Bothwell, whom the twins adored.

"Why didn't you come to tea?" asked Minnie indignantly. "It was very naughty of you."

"I was out of temper, Minnie; not fit company for nice people. How do you do, Hilda?"

He had fallen into the way of calling her by her Christian name almost from the beginning of their acquaintance; in those days when he had been so much brighter and happier than he seemed to be now.