The Heart of Penelope

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

I

The next morning Cecily Wake and her aunt left Monk's Eype. Strange, unhappy morning! during which Mrs. Robinson alone preserved her usual indifferent, haughty serenity of manner, though she also, when her face was in repose, looked weary and sad.

Wantley had found Penelope and her two guests, all three cloaked and hatted, sitting at the pretty breakfast-table laden with early September fruit and flowers. His half-suggestion that he should drive the travellers to the distant junction where they were to catch the fast train to town was at once negatived by Penelope. 'I am going with them,' she said shortly, 'and I shall have business at Burcombe which will keep me till the afternoon.'

Wantley bit his lip. What sort of day would he, Lady Wantley, and Downing, spend together? He felt angry with his cousin for having exposed them to such an ordeal. Then the elder Miss Wake asked him some insignificant question concerning the journey which lay before her, and he began speaking, going on, as it seemed to himself, aimlessly and endlessly, hardly waiting for the old lady's vague, nervous answers, while intensely, agonizingly, conscious of Cecily's quiet figure opposite, of her pale face and stricken eyes.

At last the meal which had seemed to him so interminably long came to an end, and they all went into the hall, where Lady Wantley was walking slowly up and down, waiting to bid farewell to her kinswomen, and looking, as the young man saw with a certain resentment, quite unconscious of the storms which had passed over the little company of people now gathered about her.

As Mrs. Robinson placed herself in the carriage, by the side of her old cousin, she turned to Wantley, and said deliberately, as if giving challenge: 'Sir George Downing will lunch in the Beach Room. He leaves to-night, and of course I shall be back before he starts.'

Wantley made no answer. He was engaged in drawing the rug across Cecily's knees; as he did so he felt her hand quiver a moment under his, and there came over him an eager impulse to go with her, to comfort her—above all, to shut himself off with her from all this tragic business, which apparently neither he nor she could affect or modify.

Penelope again spoke. 'You, Ludovic, will of course lunch with mamma?' He answered: 'Yes, of course, of course!' Looking straight at his cousin, he could not help adding: 'No one shall disturb Sir George Downing till your return.' And then—not till then—a wave of colour reddened Penelope's oval face from brow to chin.