She was touched.  ’Sit down, dear; I must explain to you, and make you happy against your will,’ she said, in another voice, and an English accent.  ’The mischief is done, Van.  If you do not want Rose Jocelyn to love you, you must undo it in your own way.  I am not easily deceived.  On the morning I went to her house in town, she took me aside, and spoke to me.  Not a confession in words.  The blood in her cheeks, when I mentioned you, did that for her.  Everything about you she must know—­how you bore your grief, and all.  And not in her usual free manner, but timidly, as if she feared a surprise, or feared to be wakened to the secret in her bosom she half suspects—­“Tell him!” she said, “I hope he will not forget me."’

The Countess was interrupted by a great sob; for the picture of frank Rose Jocelyn changed, and soft, and, as it were, shadowed under a veil of bashful regard for him, so filled the young man with sorrowful tenderness, that he trembled, and was as a child.

Marking the impression she had produced on him, and having worn off that which he had produced on her, the Countess resumed the art in her style of speech, easier to her than nature.

’So the sweetest of Roses may be yours, dear Van; and you have her in a gold setting, to wear on your heart.  Are you not enviable?  I will not—­no, I will not tell you she is perfect.  I must fashion the sweet young creature.  Though I am very ready to admit that she is much improved by this—­shall I call it, desired consummation?’

Evan could listen no more.  Such a struggle was rising in his breast:  the effort to quench what the Countess had so shrewdly kindled; passionate desire to look on Rose but for one lightning flash:  desire to look on her, and muffled sense of shame twin-born with it:  wild love and leaden misery mixed:  dead hopelessness and vivid hope.  Up to the neck in Purgatory, but his soul saturated with visions of Bliss!  The fair orb of Love was all that was wanted to complete his planetary state, and aloft it sprang, showing many faint, fair tracts to him, and piling huge darknesses.

As if in search of something, he suddenly went from the room.

‘I have intoxicated the poor boy,’ said the Countess, and consulted an attitude by the evening light in a mirror.  Approving the result, she rang for her mother, and sat with her till dark; telling her she could not and would not leave her dear Mama that night.  At the supper-table Evan did not appear, and Mr. Goren, after taking counsel of Mrs. Mel, dispersed the news that Evan was off to London.  On the road again, with a purse just as ill-furnished, and in his breast the light that sometimes leads gentlemen, as well as ladies, astray.

CHAPTER X

MY GENTLEMAN ON THE ROAD AGAIN