This was the first thoroughly unrestrained sentence she had spoken in all their conversation, the first clear glimpse she had given James Dugdale into the depths of her heart and experience.
They went out of the house together, and she walked by his side--he did not offer his arm--to the village. The night was bright and beautiful, and some of its calm came to the heart of Margaret, and reflected itself in her pale steadfast face. The road which they took wound past the well-kept fences and ornamental palings of a handsome place, much larger than Chayleigh, which, in Margaret's time, had been in the possession of Sir Richard Davyntry, whose good graces, and those of Lady Davyntry, she remembered her stepmother to have been particularly anxious to cultivate.
Mrs. Carteret had not succeeded remarkably well in this design, and her failure was conspicuously due to her treatment of Margaret; for Lady Davyntry was a motherly kind of woman, much younger than Mrs. Carteret, and whose own childless condition was a deep and unaffectedly-avowed grief to her.
As Margaret and her companion passed the gates of Davyntry, she remembered these "childish things," as they seemed to her now, and she paused to look at the stately trees, and the fine old Elizabethan house, on whose gilded vane the moonlight was shining coldly.
She asked if Sir Richard and Lady Davyntry were staying there just now, adding, "As I remember them, they were not people who, having a country house and place combining everything any one can possibly wish for, make a point of leaving it just when all is most beautiful."
"No," said James Dugdale, "they certainly are not; and Sir Richard stuck to it, poor fellow, as long as he could; but he died nearly a year ago, and not at Davyntry either--at his brother-in-law's place in Scotland."
"Indeed!" said Margaret. "I am sorry for Sir Richard, and more sorry still for Lady Davyntry; she is a widow indeed, I am sure. Perhaps she wants a lady companion. I might offer myself: how pleased Mrs. Carteret would be!"
"Margaret!" said James Dugdale reprovingly.
He spoke in the tone which had been familiar to him in the days when he had been "the tutor" and Margaret his pupil; and she laughed for a moment with something of the same saucy laugh with which she had been used to meet a remonstrance from him in those old days. James Dugdale's heart beat rapidly at the sound; for the first time, her coming, her presence seemed real to him.
"Well, well, I won't be spiteful," said Margaret. "Is Lady Davyntry here?"