added. “May I say how glad I am?”
“Thank you, thank you!” Emily answered. “Everything in the world seems changed, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, everything.”
They stood and gazed into each other’s eyes a few seconds, and then loosed hands with a little laugh and sat down to talk.
It was, in fact, Lady Agatha who talked most, because Emily Fox-Seton led her on and aided her to delicate expansion by her delight in all that in these days made up her existence of pure bliss. It was as if an old-time fairy story were being enacted before Emily’s eyes. Agatha without doubt had grown lovelier, she thought; she seemed even fairer, more willowy, the forget-me-not eyes were of a happier blue, as forget-me-nots growing by clear water-sides are bluer than those grown in a mere garden. She appeared, perhaps, even a little taller, and her small head had, if such a thing were possible, a prettier flowerlike poise. This, at least, Emily thought, and found her own happiness added to by her belief in her fancy. She felt that nothing was to be wondered at when she heard Agatha speak of Sir Bruce. She could not utter his name or refer to any act of his without a sound in her voice which had its parallel in the light floating haze of blush on her cheeks. In her intercourse with the world in general she would have been able to preserve her customary sweet composure, but Emily Fox-Seton was not the world. She represented a something which was so primitively of the emotions that one’s heart spoke and listened to her. Agatha was conscious that Miss Fox-Seton had seen at Mallowe—she could never quite understand how it had seemed so naturally to happen—a phase of her feelings which no one else had seen before. Bruce had seen it since, but only Bruce. There had actually been a sort of confidence between them—a confidence which had been like intimacy, though neither of them had been effusive.
“Mamma is so happy,” the girl said. “It is quite wonderful. And Alix and Hilda and Millicent and Eve—oh! it makes such a difference to them. I shall be able,” with a blush which expressed a world of relieved affection, “to give them so much pleasure. Any girl who marries happily and—and well—can alter everything for her sisters, if she remembers. You see, I shall have reason to remember. I know things from experience. And Bruce is so kind, and gay, and proud of their prettiness. Just imagine their excitement at all being bridesmaids! Bruce says we shall be like a garden of spring flowers. I am so glad,” her eyes suddenly quite heavenly in their joyful relief, “that he is young!”
The next second the heavenly relieved look died away. The exclamation had been involuntary. It had sprung from her memory of the days when she had dutifully accepted, as her portion, the possibility of being smiled upon by Walderhurst, who was two years older than her father, and her swift realisation of this fact troubled her. It was indelicate to have referred to the mental image even ever so vaguely.
But Emily Fox-Seton was glad too that Sir Bruce was young, that they were all young, and that happiness had come before they had had time to tire of waiting for it. She was so happy herself that she questioned nothing.
“Yes. It is nice,” she answered, and glowed with honest sympathy. “You will want to do the same things. It is so agreeable when people who are married like to do the same things. Perhaps you will want to go out a great deal and to travel, and you could not enjoy it if Sir Bruce did not.”
She was not reflecting in the least upon domestic circles whose male heads are capable of making themselves extremely nasty under stress of invitations it bores them to accept, and the inclination of wives and daughters to desire acceptance. She was not contemplating with any premonitory regrets a future in which, when Walderhurst did not wish to go out to dinner or disdained a ball, she should stay at home. Far from it. She simply rejoiced with Lady Agatha, who was twenty-two marrying twenty-eight.
“You are not like me,” she explained further. “I have had to work so hard and contrive so closely that everything will be a pleasure to me. Just to know that I never need starve to death or go into the workhouse is such a relief that—”
“Oh!” exclaimed Lady Agatha, quickly and involuntarily laying a hand on hers, startled by the fact that she spoke as if referring to a wholly matter-of-fact possibility.
Emily smiled, realising her feeling.
“Perhaps I ought not to have said that. I forgot. But such things are possible when one is too old to work and has nothing to depend on. You could scarcely understand. When one is very poor one is frightened, because occasionally one cannot help thinking of it.”
“But now—now! Oh! how different!” exclaimed Agatha, with heartfelt earnestness.
“Yes. Now I need never be afraid. It makes me so grateful to—Lord Walderhurst.”
Her neck grew pink as she said it, just as Lady Maria had seen it grow pink on previous occasions. Moderate as the words were, they expressed ardour.
Lord Walderhurst came in half an hour later and found her standing smiling by the window.
“You look particularly well, Emily. It’s that white frock, I suppose. You ought to wear a good deal of white,” he said.
“I will,” Emily answered. He observed that she wore the nice flush and the soft appealing look, as well as the white frock. “I wish—”
Here she stopped, feeling a little foolish.
“What do you wish?”
“I wish I could do more to please you than wear white—or black—when you like.”
He gazed at her, always through the single eyeglass. Even the vaguest approach to emotion or sentiment invariably made him feel stiff and shy. Realising this, he did not quite understand why he rather liked it in the case of Emily Fox-Seton, though he only liked it remotely and felt his own inaptness a shade absurd.
“Wear yellow or pink occasionally,” he said with a brief, awkward laugh.
What large, honest eyes the creature had, like a fine retriever’s or those of some nice animal one saw in the Zoo!
“I will wear anything you like,” she said, the nice eyes meeting his, not the least stupidly, he reflected, though women who were affectionate often looked stupid. “I will do anything you like; you don’t know what you have done for me, Lord Walderhurst.”
They moved a trifle nearer to each other, this inarticulate pair. He dropped his eyeglass and patted her shoulder.
“Say ‘Walderhurst’ or ‘James’—or—or ‘my dear,’” he said. “We are going to be married, you know.” And he found himself going to the length of kissing her cheek with some warmth.
“I sometimes wish,” she said feelingly, “that it was the fashion to say ‘my lord’ as Lady Castlewood used to do in ‘Esmond.’ I always thought it nice.”
“Women are not so respectful to their husbands in these days,” he answered, with his short laugh. “And men are not so dignified.”
“Lord Castlewood was not very dignified, was he?”
He chuckled a little.
“No. But his rank was, in the reign of Queen Anne. These are democratic days. I’ll call you ‘my lady’ if you like.”
“Oh! No—no!” with fervour, “I wasn’t thinking of anything like that.”
“I know you were not,” he reassured her. “You are not that kind of woman.”
“Oh! how could I be?”
“You couldn’t,” goodnaturedly. “That’s why I like you.”
Then he began to tell her his reason for calling at this particular hour. He came to prepare her for a visit from the Osborns, who had actually just returned from India. Captain Osborn had chosen, or chance had chosen for him, this particular time for a long leave. As soon as she heard the name of Osborn, Emily’s heart beat a little quickly. She had naturally