VI
It was just before the summer vacation, when John was eighteen, that he had written to Mary, saying--
"I've got special leave to come down next Friday and I want to ask you something. There's a girl I've got to know, well, she's twenty-five and I want you to meet her first before they do at Wenlock Hall."
She had come then and so soon. The first woman of John's own choosing now he was become a man. The jealousy she had known concerning Lucy was as nothing to this she felt with a sickness of apprehension in her now. Fate, circumstance, the mere happenings of life, these had brought him his Lucy. But here was one his heart must have sought out, his soul had chosen. She seemed to know there was no chance, but something selective about this. Here the nature that was in him had been called upon. For the first time, with no uncertainty, she was to learn what that nature was.
Mrs. Peverell indeed had spoken true when she had called him a love-child. His response to passion had been swift and soon. And was he coming, awed to love as once she had said she would teach him to come? Or was he tramping with the pride of victory and possession? The moment she saw this girl, she would know. The world was full of women who asked for no more; who judged the affections of their men by just that measure of animal passion which in their hearts and often upon their tongues they professed to despise.
Only the few there were who, never asking but waiting for the love that she had wished to teach him, inspired it. Had his heart sought out one of these? With fear and trembling she read on.
"I can't explain in writing," the letter continued, "but you must see her before any one else."
The degree of her gratitude for that for a moment drove away all fear, but not for long.
"I've told her everything about myself," she read on. "She's wonderful. She doesn't mind a bit. I want you to let me bring her down to Yarningdale. She can have my room and I'll doss out at the Inn. I know you'll like her. You must. She's splendid. I've warned her what the farm is like, that it's a bit rough, but she doesn't care and she's longing to meet you."
All Mary's intuitive impressions of her who did not mind when she had heard about her John, she put away from her and, harnessing the light horse in the spring cart, drove down that Friday to the station.