"Don't think me heartless, Meg," she murmured.
"Oh no; I understand," said I, wearily. "I dare say you're quite right. I dare say it's much better not to take things too hard."
After all, she might be right. She had said, "How can you know what I feel?" And, indeed, how could I possibly know? "How could one ever know what anybody else felt?" I repeated once more, as if to convince myself of it; and I am afraid, I am sadly afraid, that my own voice broke a little. "I know I'm not always happy, and perhaps it's because I take things too hard."
CHAPTER XXXIII.
Girls such as we were got little time for sentimental brooding, however, and though up-stairs in the little attic where Joyce and I had always slept, I threw myself on the bed and looked sadly out across the marsh with eyes that saw none of its plaintive placidity, mother soon waked me from day-dreams, and called me down-stairs to active employment that did its best to drive love and its torments from my mind.
The squire was ill; he had taken a bad cold out partridge-shooting, and mother was making him some of her special orange-jelly as a salve for his cough.
Those who were interested in the Conservative success at the elections were much concerned at the squire's illness just at this time; and Mr. Hoad, who had, it seems, been round that afternoon, had been heard to declare that it was all to "our" good that the squire should not have been able to hold forth at the rival meeting that evening.
But mother did not regard the matter in that light, and I believe she told Mr. Hoad so. I was not present; it had happened at the time I had been gone to the station, but according to Joyce, she had told him so very plainly. Mother, as I have often said, was as loyal to squire as if he had been her own son, and on this occasion so, I believe, was father also. Looking back to that time, I seem to remember the sort of rough stand-aloofness which had characterized father's attitude towards the squire, giving place of late to a curious sort of half-unwilling consideration and tenderness.
When mother called me from my bedroom to the kitchen, she was full of the squire's illness. "I hope it's nothing serious," she kept saying; "and that he won't go worrying himself any way about this accident to his nephew."