“There, now—sign.”
“Sign!—It is like witnessing a will,” said Major Harper, laughing.
“I wish you to consider it so,” returned Anne, in a low voice. “Consider it my last will—my last desire, which you promise to fulfil for me?”
He looked at her, took the pen, and signed, his hand trembling; then kissed hers.
“Anne, you know, you were my first love.”
The words—said half jesting, yet with a certain mourn-fulness—were scarcely out of his lips, than he had quitted the room. They soon heard the clatter of his horse along the avenue. Major Harper was gone out into the busy world again. He never set foot in quiet Thornhurst more.
The three that were left behind breathed freer—perhaps they would hardly have acknowledged it, but it was so.
“Well, now it is all done,” said Nathanael, as he drew closer to the sofa where Anne lay—with Agatha performing all sorts of little unnoticed cares about her. “And now I must think about going.”
No one asked him where, but Agatha glancing out of the window, thought, with a shiver, of the dreadful sea curving over into boundlessness from behind those hills.
“I find I must start at once,” he continued, “if I would catch the next boat to Havre. It sails from Southampton to-morrow morning. I have just time to ride back to Kingcombe and catch the mail train. No, I'll not let you come home with me,” he added, answering a timid look of Agatha's, which seemed to ask, should she come and help him? “No, dear, I can help myself—such a useful-handed fellow doesn't want a wife even to pack up for him. And, possibly, if you were with me, I should only find it the harder to go. It is rather hard.”