212
IVYLDER'S HAJVD.
Lord Chelford read —
I ask not, I know not, if guilt's in thy heart:
I but know that I love thee, whatever thou art.
He laughed.
"Very passionate, but hardly respectable. I once
knew," he continued a little more gravely, "a marriage
made upon that principle, and not very audaciously either,
which turned out very unhappily."
"So I. should conjecture," she said, rising from her
chair, rather drearily and abstractedly," and there is good
old Lady Sarah. I must go and ask her how she does."
She paused for a moment, holding her bouquet drooping
towards the floor, and looking with her clouded eyes down
— down — through it; and then she looked up suddenly,
with an odd, fierce smile, and she said, bitterly'enough —
"And yet, if I were a man, and capable of loving, I
could love no other way; because I suppose love to be a
madness, and the sublimest and the most despicable of
states. And I admire Moore for that flash of the fallen
angelic — it is the sentiment of a hero and a madman —
too base and too noble for this cool, wise world."
She was already moving away, nebulous in hovering folds
of snowy muslin. And she floated down like a cloud upon
the ottoman, beside old Lady Sarah, and smiled, and leaned
towards her, and talked in her sweet, low, distinct accents.
And. Lord Chelford followed her, with a sad sort of smile,
admiring her greatly.
* Of course, it was not every man's privilege to dance
with the splendid Lady of Brandon. Her kinsman, Lord
Chelford, did so; and now handsome Sir Harry Bracton,
six feet high, so broad-shouldered and slim-waisted, his
fine but not very wise face irradiated with indefatigable
smiles, stood and conversed with her, with that jaunty