"I'll give him your message," I answered. "But I know perfectly well he won't speak."
"Well, then, we must do the best we can without him," she said. "It's too late to get any one else. I must get home quickly. Good-night."
She drove on and left me standing in the road. Another time I might have thought it rude of her; but then I noticed nothing, I thought of nothing, just as she, probably, thought of nothing, but that Frank Forrester was hurt. And for my own part, I thought of nothing so much as that Joyce would—must be—heart-broken.
Taff, seeing me standing there as though turned to stone, leaped upon me, barking. I took no notice of him, but he roused me, and I tore up the hill as fast as I could to carry my grewsome message. Instinctively, I felt that this, at last, must rouse my sister to show her true feelings, and if there were a mask on her face, that this at last must strip it off.
I did not want to see Deborah, and I did not stop to go in by the front door. I climbed the hedge and crossed the lawn to the parlor window. Through the tangle of traveller's-joy and frail old-fashioned jasmine that framed it around, I looked into the room. Father and Trayton Harrod sat by the fireless hearth smoking their pipes, and at the table was Joyce, with the inevitable basket of family darning; her profile was turned towards me, listening intently, with eyelids raised and needle poised idle in her hand, to something the bailiff was saying.
What was there in anything there to vex and sour and wound me? Yet I went in hastily, letting the door slam behind me.
"Good gracious me! Fancy sitting in-doors this lovely fine evening!" said I. "We sha'n't have so many more of them that we need waste one. The summer is nearly over."
"Why, what's the matter, Meg?" asked father. "Let folk please themselves, child."
"Oh, dear, yes; they can please themselves," I answered.
"Is that all you came in-doors to say?" laughed he again.