“Not you!”
“Then I shall turn the water off, and what’ll happen to your silly old cave then?” she asked.
Relations were getting a little strained, and Peggy interposed.
“No, Daisy and I will live in the kingfisher’s nest,” she said, “and Mr. Kingfisher will peck anybody who ever looks in. And Aunt Edith shall live with us.”
This was too much for Jim.
“Perhaps we had all better live together,” he said. “I vote we do, and then we can have two houses each!”
Edith arrived as her sister had expected by the dinner-train, and a brain less quick and eyes less loving than Peggy’s could easily see that something had happened. But since Edith did not at present speak about this reason for which she particularly wanted to see her, Peggy, with the respect for the confidence of friends that with her extended even into the region of thought and conjecture, forbore from exercising her mind at all over what it was. She merely registered the fact that Edith looked splendid. So they dined outside in the tent by the river, and while the servants were in attendance talked not indeed of indifferent things, but of a hundred things that interested them both, until they should be alone and this “particular” thing come on the board of talk. And in process of time the table was cleared, and the evening papers put out, and then coffeecups were jingled away on the tray to the house. Peggy, still with the idea of not wishing even to seem to hurry a confidence, had taken up some pink sheet or other, but Edith suddenly rose and stood before her.
“Put down your paper, dear Peggy,” she said, “and listen to me. I have something to tell you, that for which I wanted to see you. Oh, Peggy, Hugh has asked me to marry him.”
The paper slid from Peggy’s knees, and she stared for one moment in sheer astonishment. At the instant the exclamation “Oh, poor Hughie!” had risen to her lips at the thought of what Edith’s answer must surely be, and almost passed them, but as instantaneously she saw how utterly off the mark was any thought of pity for Hugh. Again and again she had longed for the happiness of love and the light of it to come to her sister’s face, and she saw it there now. But that it should come like this and for him was so utterly unexpected that when Daisy had suggested the same thing this afternoon it had been no more real than Jim’s announcement that Hugh was going to live with him in the cave of water at the weir.
But now it was real; here were her sister’s hands stretched to her for congratulation, her face bent to hers for her kiss. But before she need grasp her hands or kiss her there was a reasonable question to ask.