All that evening and all the next day I creep about as one oppressed with sin. As the hour approaches that shall lay bare my secret I feel positively faint, and heartily wish myself in my grave. I am as wretched as though some calamity had befallen me; and verily I begin to think it has. With what intense longing do I wish undone all that happened yesterday!
Almost as the hall-clock, with its customary uncouthness clangs out four strokes, Mr. Carrington rides up to the door.
As I sit in an upper chamber—like Elaine, but with what different emotions!—watching my lover's coming, I can see he is looking oppressively radiant, and is actually whistling. I begin to hate him. How detestable a man looks when whistling! Ploughboys whistle!
He knocks a loud, determined, and, as it seems to me in my morbid fright, a triumphant knock at the door, and rings the bell until it sends forth a merry peal that echoes through the passages. A funny empty sensation comes into the tops of my fingers and across my forehead, as though the blood was receding, and, rising swiftly, I hurry to my own room and lock the door.
Now he is in the hall, and Billy and he are laughing—at some stupid joke, no doubt. Now he is in the library; now he has told papa it is a fine day; and now it must be all over!
I am too frightened to cry. Half an hour, an hour, go by. I long, yet fear, to open the door. Another quarter of an hour elapses, and then mother's step comes slowly along the corridor outside.
"Phyllis, are you within, open the door."
It is mother's voice, but it sounds strangely cold. I open to her, and present a woebegone face to her inspection. She comes in and comforts me for a moment silently. Then she speaks.
"Phyllis, I never thought you deceitful," she says, as severely as it is in her to say anything, and with a look of reproach in her dear eyes that cuts me to the heart.
"Mother," I cry passionately, "don't look at me like that. Indeed, indeed I am not deceitful. I knew nothing about it when he asked me yesterday to marry him. I was a great deal more surprised than even you are now. I always thought it was Dora (and I wish with all my heart it was Dora); but, though I refused him at first, he said so much afterwards that I was induced to give in. Oh, mother, won't you believe me?"