Explore "The Lake of Wine" by Bernard Capes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
At breakfast the next morning Darda waited upon her master, with swollen eyes and a very sullen manner of attention. He was in a strange mood himself, compound of perplexity and exaltation. In the girl's piteous acknowledgment of his mastery over her, he had warmed to a toleration of her foibles that was almost a regard for her as something a possession of his own. He could secretly applaud that loyalty to her brother, when -- after venting itself in rebellion against his own mandates -- it sunk from arrogance to a heart-broken appeal to his mercy. Having subdued, he could be gentle with her. Moreover, reason resuming a certain sway over his passions, he felt he had acted hastily in that little question of the "Priest's Hole."
But, there was a third and very engaging side to his meditations -- a thought that, by stooping his stiff neck to the thread of a little glossy sandal, he had tacitly pronounced himself in humble subjection to the owner thereof; in fact, that by submitting Miss Royston as his proxy of grace, he had indirectly suggested, in thin outline, a declaration to her.