Margery rose slowly from her knees.
“Well, I will go,” she said, regretfully; “but let me make you comfortable. There is your book—why, you are getting on quite fast, mother!—and here are the grapes Mr. Stuart sent, close to your hand.”
“Heaven bless him for a kind, true-hearted gentleman! Ah, there are few like him, Margery, my lass!”
“He is good, indeed,” replied the girl, a soft spot of color appearing in her cheeks. “Now, I will go; but first of all I will run into Mrs. Carter’s and ask her to come and sit with you.”
She bent and kissed the transparent cheek, tied on her sunbonnet, took up her books, and, with a parting smile, went out of the doorway.
Her message delivered at Mrs. Carter’s cottage, Margery went slowly up the hill, past the wall inclosing the wood, on past the gate leading to the Weald, Sir Hubert Coningham’s country-house, on and on, till she reached the village. The rectory stood a little way beyond the schoolhouse, close to the church, and, by the time she reached the side gate, Margery had learned her lesson by heart. The heat was quite as great as it was on the afternoon she walked to Farmer Bright’s, now four days ago; and she looked round anxiously at the sky, dreading a cloud until Wednesday was gone and the picnic with Mr. Stuart a thing of the past.
Somehow Margery found her lesson not so delightful to-day; her attention would wander, and Miss Lawson had to repeat a question three times in one of these moments before she got a response. The governess put down the girl’s absence of mind and general listless manner to the heat, and very kindly brought the lesson early to a close and dismissed her pupil.
Margery for the first time gave vent to a sigh of relief when she received permission to go home, and she sauntered through the village almost wearily. She was gazing on the ground, ignorant of what was going on about her, when the sound of ponies’ feet and the noise of wheels behind her caused her to turn, and, looking up, she saw Mrs. Crosbie, seated in her small carriage, close at hand.
“Good-afternoon, Margery,” Mrs. Crosbie said, in her haughty, cold manner. “I am glad to have met you. How is your mother?”
“Good-afternoon, madame,” replied the girl, calling Mrs. Crosbie by the name the village always used, and bending her head gracefully. “Thank you very much, but I am afraid mother is very bad to-day; I did not want to leave her, but she insisted. She grows very weak.”