It was a new doctrine, the last Agatha would have expected to hear on the lips of such a sternly good woman as she had painted Miss Valery. She said so, adding, with her usual plainness, “I thought, somehow, that you did not like Major Harper?”
“Nay, we were young together. But hush, my dear, your husband is speaking.”
He was saying, with quite an altered expression, something about “my brother Frederick.” But after that mention Major Harper's name died out of the conversation, as out of Agatha's memory. Alas, not the unfrequent fate of the Major Harpers of society—meteors, never thought of but while they are shining, and forgotten as soon as they have burnt themselves out.
By this time the two or three stray visitors—gentlemen-farmers, Anne's tenants, as Mrs. Dugdale whispered—had disappeared, and Mr. Trenchard was the sole stranger left in the drawing-room. Miss Valery did the honours of her house with a remarkably simple grace.
“I give no state dinner parties,” she said, smiling, to Mr. Trenchard. “It is a whim of mine that I never could see the use of friends meeting together merely to eat and drink, or of offering them more and richer fare than is customary or necessary. But if you will stay and dine with me, and with these my own people, country fashion, even though you have been a ten years' resident in London”—
“But have never forgotten Dorset, and good Dorset ways,” said the old gentleman, as he bowed over the hostess's hand. Then, obeying Anne's signal, he offered his arm to Mrs. Harper to lead her in to dinner;—the innocent daylight dinner, with real China-roses looking in at the window, and an energetic autumn-robin singing his good-night before the sun went down.
Agatha could have been happy, merry—she was still so young, and the weight on her heart was the first that ever had fallen there. At intervals she struggled to forget it—almost succeeded; and then the first glimpse of her husband's face, the first tone of his voice, brought the burden back again. Her spirits grew wilder than ever, lest any one should guess she was so very, very miserable.
After dinner, dreading Anne's eyes, she rushed off into the garden with Harrie Dugdale; tossing back her hair, and inhaling by gasps the cold evening wind, that it might bring calm and clearness to her brain. Even yet she felt as though she were dreaming.
Returning, she found lights in the drawing-room. Mr. Trenchard, in a patient attitude, was listening to Marmaduke Dugdale; some distance off, Nathanael sat talking to Miss Valery. Anne was leaning back in an arm-chair: the lamp shining full on her face showed how very pale and worn it was. Her voice, too, sounded feeble, as Agatha caught the words:
“In two months, you think? That is a long time.”