Few could
resist him; his impudence of ideas was so pleasantly mixed with
delicately suggested admiration of those to whom he talked. It was
impossible that John Malbrouck and his wife could have received him
other than they did; his was the eloquent, conquering spirit.
II.
By the time he reached Lake Marigold he had shaken off all those hovering
fancies of the woods, which, after all, might only have been the
whisperings of those friendly and far-seeing spirits who liked the lad
as he journeyed through their lonely pleasure-grounds. John Malbrouck
greeted him with quiet cordiality, and Mrs. Malbrouck smiled upon him
with a different smile from that with which she had speeded him a month
before; there was in it a new light of knowledge, and Gregory could not
understand it. It struck him as singular that the lady should be dressed
in finer garments than she wore when he last saw her; though certainly
her purple became her. She wore it as if born to it; and with an air
more sedately courteous than he had ever seen, save at one house in Park
Lane. Had this rustle of fine trappings been made for him? No; the
woman had a mind above such snobbishness, he thought.
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