“It is very selfish,” Ethel caught herself saying.
“No, no, it is not,” cried Meta. “It is not that he will not see, but that he cannot see. Good honest fellow, he really thinks it does her good and pleases her. I was so sorry one evening when I tried to take her place at that perpetual ecarte, and told him it teased her; he went so wistfully to her, and asked whether it did, and she exerted herself into such painful enjoyment to persuade him to the contrary; and afterwards she said to me, ‘Let me alone, dearest—it is the only thing left me.’”
“There is something in being husband and wife that one cannot understand,” slowly said Ethel, so much in her quaint way that Meta laughed.
Had it not been for Norman’s absence, Ethel would, in the warm sympathy and accustomed manner of Meta Rivers, have forgotten all about the hopes and fears that, in brighter days, had centred on that small personage; until one day, as she came home from Cocksmoor, she found “Sir Henry Walkinghame’s” card on the drawing-room table. “I should like to bite you! Coming here, are you?” was her amiable reflection.
Meta, in her riding-habit, peeped out of Margaret’s room. “Oh, Ethel, there you are! It is such a boon that you did not come home sooner, or we should have had to ride home with him! I heard him asking for the Miss Mays! And now I am in hopes that he will go home without falling in with Flora and George.”
“I did not know he was in these parts.”
“He came to Drydale last week, but the place is forlorn, and George gave him a general invitation to the Grange.”
“Do you like him?” said Ethel, while Margaret looked on, amazed at her audacity.
“I liked him very much in London,” said Meta; “he is pleasant enough to talk to, but somehow, he is not congruous here—if you understand me. And I think his coming oppresses Flora—she turned quite pale when he was announced, and her voice was lower than ever when she spoke to him.”
“Does he come often?” said Ethel.