He
strolled about the grounds with her; he drank the sweet melody of her
voice in Heine's tenderest ballads; he read to her on the sunlit lawn in
the lazy afternoon hours; he played billiards with her; he was her
faithful attendant at afternoon tea; he gave himself up to the study of
her character, which, to his charmed eyes, seemed the perfection of pure
and placid womanhood. There might, perhaps, be some lack of passion and
of force in this nature, a marked absence of that impulsive feeling
which is a charm in some women: but this want was atoned for by
sweetness of character, and Mr. Hammond argued that in these calm
natures there is often an unsuspected depth, a latent force, a grandeur
of soul, which only reveals itself in the great ordeals of life.
So John Hammond hung about the luxurious drawing-room at Fellside in a
manner which his friend Maulevrier ridiculed as unmanly.
'I had no idea you were such a tame cat,' he said: 'if when we were
salmon fishing in Canada anybody had told me you could loll about a
drawing-room all day listening to a girl squalling and reading novels, I
shouldn't have believed a word of it.
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