“You must not fret, Margery,” he said, as kindly as he could; sympathy, always difficult to him, was almost impossible now. “You are looking very pale and ill.”
The girl raised her hands, and pressed them over her hot eyes; then she rose with a faint smile, and drew nearer to the door, leaning back against it with a weary little sigh.
“I am very tired,” she said, wistfully, “and the heat tries me.”
“Come to my mother, and she will nurse you; you do not know what a clever doctor she is. Come! Let me take you away with me—I will borrow a cart from some one in the village. Do come, Margery!”
Margery shook her head.
“I cannot go,” she answered, slowly. “Do not think me unkind; I cannot go.”
His face fell, and there was silence between them for a few minutes. Her heavily-fringed lids drooped over her eyes, and so he gazed, while the love raging within his heart urged him to take this frail, sad being from sorrow to happiness. Suddenly it grew too much for him, and, putting out his hands, he grasped hers tenderly.
“Margery,” he said—“my darling!”
Margery tremblingly withdrew her hands, and her eyes met his glowing ones, with horror and distress in their depths. She had never dreamed of this. She had liked Robert, thinking him a cheery, kind-hearted man; but love—love from him, when every pulse in her beat only for Stuart! It was a horror—a sacrilege!
Robert Bright saw her slight shudder, and he tried once more to grasp her hands.