But though the servants remarked the change in their beloved mistress, they did not guess at its cause; for, by chance rather than design, none of them had seen Ida and Stafford together.  And yet they met daily.  Sometimes Stafford would ride over from Brae Wood and meet her by the river.  There was a hollow there, so deep that it hid not only themselves but the horses, and here they would sit, hand in hand, or more often with his arm round her and her small, shapely head with its soft, but roughened hair, upon his breast.  Sometimes he would row across the lake and they would walk side by side along the bank, and screened by the trees in which the linnet and the thrush sang the songs which make a lover’s litany; at others—­and these were the sweetest meeting of all, for they came in the soft and stilly night when all nature was hushed as if under the spell of the one great passion—­he would ride or walk over after dinner, and they would sit in the ruined archway of the old chapel and talk of their blank past, the magic present, and the future which was to hold nothing but happiness.

Love grows fast under such conditions, and the love of these two mortals grew to gigantic proportions, absorbing the lives of both of them.  To Stafford, all the hours that were not spent with this girl of his heart were so much dreary waste.

To Ida—­ah, well, who shall measure the intensity of a girl’s first passion?  She only lived in the expectation of seeing him, in his presence and the whispered words and caresses of his love; and, in his absence, in the memory of them.  For her life meant just this man who had come and taken the heart from her bosom and enthroned his own in its place.

They told each other everything.  Stafford knew the whole of her life before they met, all the little details of the daily routine of the Hall, and her management of the farm; and she learnt from him all that was going on at the great, splendid palace which in his modesty Sir Stephen Orme had called the Villa.  She liked to nestle against him and hear the small details of his life, as he liked to hear hers; and she seemed to know all the visitors at the Villa, and their peculiarities, as well as if she were personally acquainted with them.

“You ought not to leave them so much, Stafford.” she said, with mock reproof, as they sat one afternoon in the ballow by the river.  “Don’t you think they notice your absence and wonder where you are?”

“Shouldn’t think so,” he replied.  “Besides, I don’t care if they do.  All my worry is that I can’t come to you oftener.  Every time I leave you I count up the hours that must pass before I see you again.  But I expect most, if not all, of the visitors will be off presently.  Most of ’em have been there the regulation fortnight; a good many come backwards and forwards; they’re the city men, the money men.  My father is closeted with them for hours every day—­that big scheme of his seems to be coming off satisfactorily.  It’s a railway to some place in Africa, and all these fellows—­the Griffenbergs, and Beltons, that fat German baron, Wirsch, and the rest of them, are in it.  Heaven knows why my father wants to worry about it for.  I heard one of them say that he calculated to make a million and a half out of it.  As if he weren’t rich enough!”