"Who said it were?" asked Jane rather rudely. She knew very well that speak as she might her mistress would take very little notice of her now. "I said a young gentleman was in the parlor," she continued in a higher key, as if Margaret had been deaf, "and I've too much to do to be wasting my time argufying. Everybody can't set doing nothing all day like some folk I could tell of. Are you going to see him or are you not?"
"I will see him," replied Margaret quietly. "Ask him to wait a few minutes."
She had wondered only a moment before how she could bear the disappointment. It came, and she neither fainted nor wept, only there fell a chiller shadow over her heart—the darkness of her lot on earth seemed to deepen.
She watched with eyes from which all the light had gone out until Jane had re-entered the house, then she rose again, and this time no ultra-impetuousness delayed her. The name on the card puzzled her. She had a vague notion she had seen it somewhere before, but in her trouble her London remembrances were partially swamped. She scarcely knew even why she had decided to grant this young man an interview. She was only obeying a secret impulse: he might possibly be the bearer of a message.
She had not thought at the moment she left her seat that the parlor-window looked out upon the little garden; but so it was, and as languidly and with apparent pain she crossed the lawn its temporary occupant was gazing upon her.
Her appearance shocked him terribly. He had been in no way prepared for the change which that week of misery and loneliness had brought about. She did not look the same. Then, indeed, she had been sad, but the sadness had not absorbed her utterly—had not written on her face the haggard, weary hopelessness which it now bore.
The young man's heart contracted painfully; a sudden dismay seized him. He would have turned and fled. How could he bear to face this suffering? In its presence he felt weak and helpless as a child.
But he looked at her again, the white patient face with its halo of golden color, the weak languid steps, the beautiful outlines, the never-failing, unconscious grace, and as he looked the love of his heart surged in a great wave over his being. Unconsciously he clasped his hands, his brows knit, his form dilated.
"God helping me," he said in a low impassioned voice that swept upward from the innermost depths of his spirit—"God helping me, I will help her!"