As I stood there, watching them, a sudden recollection of Rupert came. I couldn't say what brought it, except those boys playing together. Rupert and I had often played together many years before. Or it may have been that I was free at last from bondage to Walter Russell, and so I could spring back to my old liking and thoughts of him. Like a piece of whalebone, you know, that's bent and tied down; but so soon as ever it's untied, it'll leap out straight as it was before.
His face rose up before me—such a good plain honest face; and I seemed to see it as I had that last time with a glow of feeling, only all the anger and hardness were gone. He had loved me so truly—so different from Walter Russell, who only loved himself and made use of me for his own purposes. Two men couldn't be more unlike and opposite than those two.
"Poor Rupert!" I sighed; "I wonder what's become of him! I wonder what he would think of all these changes!"
And oh, how grieved he would be about father! I could hardly keep back my tears, picturing this.
"And it was I who drove him away!" I went on. "I—for the sake of Walter Russell."
I did want to see Rupert again—poor Rupert, whom I had so scorned after all his goodness and devotion to me. But perhaps I never should: and even if some day I did, he would not be the same. He would have forgotten his old liking for Kitty.
"I shall have grown ugly by that time," I murmured; "and he will have learnt to like somebody else. And it will be just what I deserve."
Then Mary came in.
"Is mother upstairs?" I asked.
Mary looked a little pale and troubled, I thought.