Mrs. Bethune's spirit made her the idol and confidante of her boys. Her fun was unquenched, even when the fire of life would seem to have gone out for ever; after the terrible fall, when, to save the infant in her arms, she had laid herself upon her back for life. The baby—Orme—was found unhurt, folded round, so it seemed, by the broken body of his mother. Ross, the most thoughtful, she averred, of her six sons, once said to her:
"Mummie, you do laugh mor'n anybody. Is it 'cos you can't walk?"
"Yes, little son, perhaps it is; to make up, you know."
And Sandy, butting his bright head into her knees one day, inconsolable about something, was won to laughter by, "Sandy, laugh! Look at me!"—and he had looked. And the irresistible witchery of the beautiful dark eyes had cured his woe. She was always the sunshiny centre of the house, and only her husband, or Marjorie in rare moments, guessed how sometimes the bright spirit quailed.
The Dean was popular in the county. When Mr. Pelham came into the Deanery garden somewhat late, he found Mrs. Bethune's chair under the chestnut trees, a centre of laughter and conversation. Marjorie was standing by her mother, with a wistful look on her face, he thought at first sight, wondering at its expression. Love, when presented first to a girl brought up as Marjorie had been, comes as a great shock. That it should be Mr. Warde of all men who should cause her this disquiet filled Marjorie with a sense of the unsatisfactoriness of the world. It disturbed things that had seemed to her as settled as the hills round Norham that this old friend should want to be her lover.
Before going to the Deanery she had sent a little note in answer to his letter, in which she had said—
"There is nothing to forgive. But you must not think of me like this any more. You have always been so kind to all of us that it grieves me to say 'No' to anything you want. Still, it must be 'No.'"
She hoped he would not be present at the Deanery. It was his turn of duty at the cathedral. She would bring her mother away early, before he arrived. The afternoon was quite spoilt for her.
And then Mr. Pelham had come up, and she had introduced him to her mother with a tremulousness and agitation quite unlike her usual serenity.