‘Could what?’ Susan’s eyes are almost menacing.
‘Think of him—in that way. He is well off, my dear, and——’
‘I shall not marry James,’ says Susan distinctly. ‘I wonder how you could suggest it to me.’
‘Certainly he is very ugly,’ says Miss Barry, who has grown, poor soul, very meek of late; the smashing of the bank that had held the four hundred pounds, the savings of years, that the Rector had laid by with the hope of putting his eldest boy into the army, has lowered her spirit. Poverty seems to pursue them. And the sight of the Rector, crushed and more gaunt than usual, has gone to her old heart. If only Susan—any of them—could be provided for. How happy that girl Ella is! how rich the man is who has chosen her! and yet is she to be so much as compared with Susan? Miss Barry’s soul swells within her at the injustice of it all.
If only Susan could be induced to think of James McIlveagh. But no, Susan is not like that. She looks up suddenly, and there before her eyes are James and Susan strolling leisurely, in quite a loverlike way, towards the little shrubbery. Can the girl have taken her hint to heart? A glow of hope radiates her mind for a moment. But then come other thoughts, and fear, and trouble, and a keen, strange disappointment.
No, no! Susan—Susan to be worldly! Her pretty girl! God grant she has not been the means of driving her to belie her better—her own—self.
Good gracious! If Susan comes back and tells her she has engaged herself to James because of her father’s trouble—because of Carew’s trouble—what shall she do? Miss Barry, who is hardly equal to emergencies so great as this, looks with a certain wildness round her. Who can help her? That foolish girl must be sent for; brought back from that shrubbery where Miss Barry, in her panic, feels now assured James is once again, for the hundredth time, proposing to her, and being (no doubt to his everlasting astonishment) accepted. The last words can’t have been said as yet: there may still be time to drag Susan out of the fire.
Wyndham and Ella and Miss Manning are coming towards her. Ella is going home; it is nearly seven o’clock, and Wyndham will have barely time to see her to the Cottage and catch his train to Dublin. Miss Barry bids him a rather hurried good-bye, and then looks round for Betty. Betty is always useful—when she can be found! But unfortunately Betty and Dom have gone off to eat green gooseberries in the vegetable garden, a fearsome occupation, of which they are both disgracefully fond, and that seems to affect their stomachs in no wise. Betty, therefore, is not to be had, but Miss Barry’s troubled eye wandering round sees Crosby, who is sitting with Bonnie on his knee, and with courage born of desperation she beckons him to come to her.
‘Mr. Crosby, I want Betty. Where is she?’
‘I think she went into the garden a moment ago with Dom.’