‘Yes,’ said Cytherea, colouring, and trying not to look guilty of a surreptitious knowledge of him.

’I am Mr. Springrove.  I passed Corvsgate Castle about an hour ago, and soon afterwards met your brother going that way.  He had been deceived in the distance, and was about to turn without seeing the ruin, on account of a lameness that had come on in his leg or foot.  I proposed that he should go on, since he had got so near; and afterwards, instead of walking back to the boat, get across to Anglebury Station—­a shorter walk for him—­where he could catch the late train, and go directly home.  I could let you know what he had done, and allay any uneasiness.’

‘Is the lameness serious, do you know?’

’O no; simply from over-walking himself.  Still, it was just as well to ride home.’

Relieved from her apprehensions on Owen’s score, she was able slightly to examine the appearance of her informant—­Edward Springrove—­who now removed his hat for a while, to cool himself.  He was rather above her brother’s height.  Although the upper part of his face and head was handsomely formed, and bounded by lines of sufficiently masculine regularity, his brows were somewhat too softly arched, and finely pencilled for one of his sex; without prejudice, however, to the belief which the sum total of his features inspired—­that though they did not prove that the man who thought inside them would do much in the world, men who had done most of all had had no better ones.  Across his forehead, otherwise perfectly smooth, ran one thin line, the healthy freshness of his remaining features expressing that it had come there prematurely.

Though some years short of the age at which the clear spirit bids good-bye to the last infirmity of noble mind, and takes to house-hunting and investments, he had reached the period in a young man’s life when episodic periods, with a hopeful birth and a disappointing death, have begun to accumulate, and to bear a fruit of generalities; his glance sometimes seeming to state, ’I have already thought out the issue of such conditions as these we are experiencing.’  At other times he wore an abstracted look:  ’I seem to have lived through this moment before.’

He was carelessly dressed in dark grey, wearing a rolled-up black kerchief as a neck-cloth; the knot of which was disarranged, and stood obliquely—­a deposit of white dust having lodged in the creases.

‘I am sorry for your disappointment,’ he continued, glancing into her face.  Their eyes having met, became, as it were, mutually locked together, and the single instant only which good breeding allows as the length of such a look, became trebled:  a clear penetrating ray of intelligence had shot from each into each, giving birth to one of those unaccountable sensations which carry home to the heart before the hand has been touched or the merest compliment passed, by something stronger than mathematical proof, the conviction, ‘A tie has begun to unite us.’