The countess-dowager would willingly have allowed him to sit down without
any. Her welcome was demonstrative; her display of affection quite warm,
and she called him "Val," tenderly. He escaped for a minute to his room,
washed his hands, brushed his hair, and was down again, and taking the
head of his own table.
It was pleasant to have him there--a welcome change from Hartledon's
recent monotony; and even Maude, with her boasted dislike, felt prejudice
melting away. Boasted dislike, not real, it had been. None could dislike
Percival. He was not Edward, and it was him Maude had loved. Percival she
never would love, but she might learn to like him. As he sat near her, in
his plain black morning attire, courteous, genuinely sweet-tempered, his
good looks conspicuous, a smile on his delicate, refined, but vacillating
lips, and his honest dark-blue eyes bent upon her in kindness, Maude for
the first time admitted a vision of the possible future, together with a
dim consciousness that it might not be intolerable. Half the world, of
her age and sex, would have deemed it indeed a triumph to be made the
wife of that attractive man.
He had cautiously stood aside for Lady Kirton to take the head of the
table; but the dowager had positively refused, and subsided into the
chair at the foot. She did not fill it in dear Edward's time, she said;
neither should she in dear Val's; he had come home to occupy his own
place.
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