"Tire of you, Meg!" he cried, facing round upon her. "It is because I love you that I say this. But it is not as the friend of your childhood that I love you. We must make no mistake. I love you as the man loves the one woman in all the world he wants for his wife. If you cannot accept that love from me I would prefer not to see you again."
She did not reply, and she averted her face. When she looked slowly up, even in the tension of waiting for her answer, he felt something of the thrill he might have experienced if a spirit had answered to his call. The child he had known was looking back at him. A something he had missed—a mystery of spiritual identity with the Meg of long ago, glimmerings of which he had caught—had waked up. It was the child grown to be a woman—endowed with a woman's soul, gifted with a thousandfold powers of feeling. She did not speak; her silence, her quivering features, her kindling countenance answered him.
"Meg!" he said in a low voice, and bending forward he drew her to him.
CHAPTER XXVI.
BEFORE THE PICTURE.
Meg delayed announcing the news of her engagement to Sir Malcolm. She feared the effect upon him of hearing that she had betrothed herself to the man who had written those attacks in the local newspaper. Sir Malcolm had been ailing during the winter.
"She could not leave him yet," she told her lover. "It was her duty to remain with him." And he agreed that it was for awhile.
The crisis, however, came sooner than she anticipated. A trouble had been fermenting in Sir Malcolm's secret thoughts. He had noticed Meg's absences. Always regular at her post at the hours when he required her services as secretary and reader, he missed her companionship in his walks; he had lost the certainty of meeting her in the drawing-room, in her little study with her books, or at the piano.