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'I was very much in love with her. I have never got over it, I'm afraid. She gazed fixedly at the fire. Her lips were compressed. She saw a slender girl, in a plain black frock, with a sensitive, pale face, luminous, sad, dark eyes, and a mass of dark, waving hair Mary Isona, of Italian parentage, a little music teacher, whose only relation to the world Theodore Vellan lived in was professional.
Beyond Pigeon Hugo are two notable headlands, Vellan and Pradanack. This brings us to Mullion, another small metropolis of what is considered the Lizard district, though we have now left the true Lizard five or six miles behind us.
She had answered by telegraph, 'Come and dine at eight to-night, to which he had wired back an acceptance. Thereupon, she had told her son that he must dine at his club; and now she was seated before her fire, waiting for Theodore Vellan to arrive, and thinking of thirty years ago.
Vellan, as she recalled him, had been, before all things, gentle. He was witty, he had humour, he had imagination; but he was, before all things, gentle with the gentlest voice, the gentlest eyes, the gentlest manners. His gentleness, she told herself, was the chief element of his charm his gentleness, which was really a phase of his modesty.
She thought of this, and then she remembered that her husband was dead, that her brother was dead, and that Theodore Vellan had been dead to his world, at all events, for thirty years. Not one of them had in any way distinguished himself; not one had in any measure fulfilled the promise of his youth. Her memories were sweet and bitter; they made her heart glow and ache.
As we proceeded, trees grew scarcer and scarcer. At last we came to a tavern with a sign-board, on the east side of which was painted "The last refreshment house in England;" and on the other, facing the Atlantic, "The first refreshment house in England." Among the many pretty coves we saw was one called Vellan Dreath, or the Mill in the Sand; but not a vestige of the mill remains.
I suppose he is the only man in two hemispheres who finds the opposite condition a matter of regret. Theodore Vellan had been out of England for more than thirty years. Thirty odd years ago the set he lived in had been startled and mystified by his sudden flight and disappearance. At that time his position here had seemed a singularly pleasant one.
She had fallen in love with a man who was scarcely conscious of her existence; she, a little obscure Italian music teacher, had fallen in love with Theodore Vellan. It was as if she had fallen in love with an inhabitant of another planet: the worlds they respectively belonged to were so far apart She loved him she loved him and she knew her love was hopeless, and she could not bear it.
Mrs Sandryl-Kempton sat before the fire in her wide, airy, faded drawing-room, and thought of the Theodore Vellan of old days, and wondered what the present Lord Vellan would be like. She had got a note from him that morning, despatched from Southampton the day before, announcing, 'I shall be in town to-morrow at Bowden's Hotel, in Cork Street, and asking when he might come to her.
South of Mullyon are the bold headlands of Pradanack Point and Vellan Head, while beyond we come to the most noted spot on the Lizard peninsular coast.
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