She stroked his hair back from his forehead.
“Oh, give me many of them, Hughie!” she said. “I am greedy of love. But though this chapter is over, the next is going to be even better, if you can compare things that are perfect. Oh, how proud I am going to be of you and your voice and your acting! I can’t help that, and I don’t want to. It is all part of you, and, yes, I know I have helped, and I share in it. So let us read the dear chapters just as they come, re-reading what is past, if you like, but not sadly, not thinking it will not come again. And let us not look forward too much. Let us take things as they come to us—— There, what a long speech! If Andrew Robb had written that, Mr. Jervis would certainly have insisted on his cutting some of it.”
“But I am not Mr. Jervis,” said Hugh.
He paused a moment.
“And I could not spare any of it,” he said, “any more than I could spare any of you. Yes, darling, I agree. Let us read on together, and not, as you suggested, peep forward at the end. For who knows?”
. . . . . . . .
All day the wind and rain lasted, and though during the night the fury of its blowing abated, yet it was a gray and streaming morning when they left next day for town. The trees, battered by the wind of the day before, stood motionless in the leaden stillness, the smoke from the chimneys ascended straight and was soon lost in the thick rain-streaked air, and as their carriage drove to the gate it passed over the wreckage on the branch-bestrewn gravel. And Edith, as she leaned out to catch a last glimpse of the house, felt again the irrevocable sense of beautiful days gone, and the last of them, she thought, was the most beautiful of all and the hardest to part with. Yet they were stored and garnered within her, as imperishable as her own spirit, hidden and germinating in the inner life of her.
CHAPTER IX
IT was nearly a year since Peggy and her sister had dined with early punctuality one night and set off, with Hugh following in a hansom, to be in time for the rise of a momentous curtain, and once again, at much the same hour—though Hugh, instead of following, had long ago preceded them—they were hurrying eastward in Peggy’s electric broughham, the one possession, it may be remembered, that she desired other people to consider to be hers. Inside the brougham, too, there was much similarity between the moral atmosphere of those two occasions, for once again Peggy was excited and voluble, and Edith, with far more cause for mental unrest, was outwardly as calm and undisturbed as ever. Soon also, even as had happened some ten or eleven months ago, they got into a queue of interminable length. To-day, however, it extended not to the doors of the Piccadilly Theatre, but to a large portal farther east in Bow Street.
“Yes, the Education Bill,” said Peggy, who was clearly talking for no other reason except that the edge of anxiety and excitement is felt less in conversation than in silence, “how interesting and instructive it is to observe the Government all standing in a row and industriously digging their own graves! So unnecessary; as if the Opposition was not quite willing, even desirous or wishful, as Canon Alington would say, to do it for them. Why do clergymen say ‘wishful’ and ‘oftentimes’? Is it merely in order to make their lay-brothers chatter with rage? Oh, dear, I saw a poster, with ‘Lohengrin’ quite large on it! Edith, I don’t think I can bear it; I don’t, really!”