Prev | Current Page 147 | Next

Braddon, M. E. (Mary Elizabeth), 1835-1915

"Phantom Fortune, a Novel"


Lesbia was in a pensive mood this evening. She sat in the verandah,
looking dreamily at the lake, and at Fairfield yonder, a broad green
slope, silvered with moonlight, and seeming to stretch far away into
unfathomable distance.
If one could but take one's lover by the hand and go wandering over
those mystic moonlit slopes into some new unreal world where it would
not matter whether a man were rich or poor, high-born or low-born, where
there should be no such things as rank and state to be won or lost!
Lesbia felt to-night as if she would like to live out her life in
dreamland. Reality was too hard, too much set round by difficulties and
sacrifices.
While Lesbia was losing herself in that dream-world, Lady Maulevrier
unbent considerably to John Hammond, and talked to him with more
appearance of interest in his actual self, and in his own affairs, than
she had manifested hitherto although she had been uniformly courteous.
She asked him his plans for the future--had he chosen a profession?
He told her that he had not.


Pages:
135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159