‘Will he forgive me?’ she murmured.  ’Oh, my God!  I wish we were dead together!’

Her weeping ceased, and she closed the window, and undressed as far away from the mirror as she could get; but its force was too much for her, and drew her to it.  Some undefined hope had sprung in her suddenly.  With nervous slow steps she approached the glass, and first brushing back the masses of black hair from her brow, looked as for some new revelation.  Long and anxiously she perused her features:  the wide bony forehead; the eyes deep-set and rounded with the scarlet of recent tears, the thin nose-sharp as the dead; the weak irritable mouth and sunken cheeks.  She gazed like a spirit disconnected from what she saw.  Presently a sort of forlorn negative was indicated by the motion of her head.

‘I can pardon him,’ she said, and sighed.  ’How could he love such a face!’

CHAPTER XXX

THE BATTLE OF THE BULL-DOGS.  PART I

At the South-western extremity of the park, with a view extending over wide meadows and troubled mill waters, yellow barn-roofs and weather-gray old farm-walls, two grassy mounds threw their slopes to the margin of the stream.  Here the bull-dogs held revel.  The hollow between the slopes was crowned by a bending birch, which rose three-stemmed from the root, and hung a noiseless green shower over the basin of green it shadowed.  Beneath it the interminable growl sounded pleasantly; softly shot the sparkle of the twisting water, and you might dream things half-fulfilled.  Knots of fern were about, but the tops of the mounds were firm grass, evidently well rolled, and with an eye to airy feet.  Olympus one eminence was called, Parnassus the other.  Olympus a little overlooked Parnassus, but Parnassus was broader and altogether better adapted for the games of the Muses.  Round the edges of both there was a well-trimmed bush of laurel, obscuring only the feet of the dancers from the observing gods.  For on Olympus the elders reclined.  Great efforts had occasionally been made to dispossess and unseat them, and their security depended mainly on a hump in the middle of the mound which defied the dance.

Watteau-like groups were already couched in the shade.  There were ladies of all sorts:  town-bred and country-bred:  farmers’ daughters and daughters of peers:  for this pic-nic, as Lady Jocelyn, disgusting the Countess, would call it, was in reality a ‘fete champetre’, given annually, to which the fair offspring of the superior tenants were invited the brothers and fathers coming to fetch them in the evening.  It struck the eye of the Countess de Saldar that Olympus would be a fitting throne for her, and a point whence her shafts might fly without fear of a return.  Like another illustrious General at Salamanca, she directed a detachment to take possession of the height.  Courtly Sir John Loring ran up at once, and gave