Not until James Dugdale uttered her name with a faltering, with an almost frightened voice, as one might address a spirit, did the face in the window droop, and the eyes search for the speaker. But then Margaret Hungerford leaned forward, and said, quite calmly,
"Yes, Mr. Dugdale, it is I."
[CHAPTER VI.]
HALF-CONFIDENCES.
"You cannot surely be serious--you do not really mean it?" said James Dugdale, in a pleading tone, to Margaret Hungerford, as, some hours after he had discovered her presence at Chayleigh, they were talking together in the drawing-room.
"I do mean it," she replied. "You never understood me, I think, and you certainly do not understand me now, if you think I shall remain here dependent on my father, having left his house as I did."
James Dugdale did not speak for some minutes. He was pondering upon what she had said. He had never understood her! If not he, who ever had? Unjust to him she had always been, and she was still unjust to him. But that did not matter: it was of her he must think, not of himself.
The first bewildering surprise of Margaret's arrival had passed away; the mingled strangeness and familiarity of seeing her again, changed as she was, in the old home so long forsaken, had taken its place, and James Dugdale was looking at her, and listening to her, like a man in a dream.
Their meeting had been very calm and emotionless. Margaret, in addition to the hardness of manner which had grown upon her in her hard life, had felt no pleasure in seeing James Dugdale again. She had not quite forgiven him, even yet, and, though she was relieved by finding that the first explanations were to be given to him, and not to her father or Mrs. Carteret, she had made them ungraciously enough, and with just sufficient formal acknowledgment of the service which James Dugdale had rendered her, in securing to her the friendship and aid of Hayes Meredith, as convinced her sensitive hearer that she would rather have been indebted to the kindness of any other person.
On certain points he found her reserve invulnerable; and he was not slow to suspect that she had made up her mind exactly as to how much of her past life she would reveal, and how much should remain concealed; and he did not doubt her power of adhering to such a resolution. She had briefly alluded to her widowhood, acknowledged the kindness she had experienced from Hayes Meredith, said a little about the poverty in which he had found her, and had then left the subject of herself and all concerning her, as if it wearied her, and with a decision of manner which prevented James Dugdale from questioning her further.