"Do I? Indeed I do, Margaret. Tell me, are you asking me this for yourself? Are you asking me if I think, because you have had the least-deserved misfortune to have been the wife of a bad man, and you have been released from him, you are to carry the chain in fancy which has been taken off you in reality? It's unlike you; it is morbid to ask, to think of such a thing. What are you but a young girl still? Are you to do penance all your life for the sins of another? No, no, Margaret; silent as you are about your past, you are asking me this question in reference to yourself. Is it not so? Do not place a half-confidence in me. Do not let a delusion like this take possession of your mind, and blight your future as your past has been blighted."
"There is nothing in my question," said Margaret, drawing her hand away from Lady Davyntry, and rising; "nothing in the sense you mean. My future seems plain and clear enough now. My place in the world is fixed, I fancy; but sometimes, Eleanor, sometimes the past, of which I have never spoken to you, of which I cannot speak, comes back to me, not only in its own dreadful shape, but with a dim undefined threat in it, and makes me afraid. You don't understand me; well for you that you do not. I trust you never may."
She picked up her bonnet and tied it on, and was folding her shawl round her, while Lady Davyntry stood by, longing to speak out all that was in her mind, and yet fearing to damage her own hopes by doing so and learning the worst, when the door opened, and Haldane Carteret and Mr. Baldwin came into the room.
Margaret was standing with her back towards the door, and facing a mirror, in which Lady Davyntry saw her face reflected. It was startlingly pale, and there was a wild look of pain in the eyes, quite other than sadness--sometimes a little stern--which was their usual expression.
Lady Davyntry could hardly reply to the cheery greeting of Haldane, so much was she struck by Margaret's change of countenance. Margaret spoke hurriedly to Mr. Baldwin. The only one of the four who did not know that there was a consciousness on the part of all the others that something unusual had taken place was Haldane.
"I have come to fetch you home, Madge," he said, "and then I'm going out for a ride with Baldwin, and we dine with the Croftons, so you won't see much of me to-day. Are you ready?"
"Quite ready," said Margaret; and she kissed Lady Davyntry, and took so hurried a leave of her that her friend had not time to ask her a question. She was about to give Mr. Baldwin her hand, and bid him good-bye too, but he said he was going their way--his horses might be taken to Chayleigh.
When she was left alone, Lady Davyntry tried to disentangle her impressions of what had occurred. At last she thought she saw the meaning of it all. Margaret had found out Mr. Baldwin's not-carefully-preserved secret, even as she (Eleanor) had found it out, and she loved him. Yes, his sister was sure of it. She had all the acuteness which keen feeling and true sympathy give, and which is truer in emergencies than that of mere intellectual cleverness, and she knew that a sharp and severe struggle was raging in the young widow's heart.
She understood it all now--she understood that Margaret shrank from the avowal to herself that she had learned to love and trust again, that she had not been able to carry out the expiatory process which she had resolved--the process of loneliness and labour of self-repression, and the abnegation of the true happiness to be had even in this world, because she had been beguiled by the false. She understood that Margaret, however believing and trusting in Fitzwilliam Baldwin's love, would feel that there was no equality between them, and that the serene and beautiful fancies of a happy girl were not for her, while all the illusion and gladness of life's early days still were his. Intuitively Lady Davyntry understood it all; the face she had seen in the glass, when her brother's entrance had surprised Margaret in one of her rare moments of emotion, had made it all plain to her.
"She will refuse him," Eleanor thought; "she will refuse him. These two, the most suited to one another, the best calculated to be happy of any people I ever knew--the very ideal of a well-matched pair--will be kept apart by a chimera. So the evil of that vile man's life lives after him, and he has the power to make her and others miserable, though he is in his grave. Shall I speak openly to Fitzwilliam? I cannot do harm now. No man could be more bent upon anything than he is on marrying Margaret. I may as well let him know--if, indeed, he has not guessed it--how much I wish it too."