"What's the matter?" said her brother. He felt what she had just said deeply, notwithstanding his insouciance. "What are you walking so fast for? You look as if you saw a ghost!"
"What, in the daylight, Hal?" said Margaret with a forced laugh. "No, we are rather late; let us go in."
The pleasure of Lady Davyntry in the perfect success of all her most cherished wishes would have been delightful to witness to any observer of a philosophic tendency. It is so rarely that any one is happy and grateful in proportion to one's anxiety and effort. Such purely disinterested pleasure as was hers is not frequently desired or enjoyed.
"If anybody had told me I could ever feel so happy again in a world which my Richard has left, I certainly would not have believed them," said Eleanor, as Margaret strove to thank her for the welcome she gave her to the proud and happy position soon to be hers; "and you would hardly believe me, Madge, if I were to tell you how short a time after the day I tried to make Fitz spy you through the glass there, and he was much too proper and genteel to do anything of the kind, I began to look forward to this happy event."
To do Lady Davyntry justice, it was some time before she admitted minor considerations in support of her vast and intense satisfaction; it was actually twenty-four hours after her brother had informed her that Margaret had accepted him, when she found herself saying aloud, in the gladness of her heart and the privacy of her own room, "How delightful it is to think that now there is no danger of his marrying a Scotchwoman! How savage Jessie MacAlpine will be!"
The dew was shining on the grass and the flowers, the birds had hardly begun their morning hymn, on a morning in the gorgeous month of June, when Margaret Hungerford, wrapped in a white dressing-gown, and leaning out of the passion-flower-framed window of her room, looked out towards the woods of Davyntry. The tall, fantastic, twisted chimneys and turrets, rich with the deep red of the old brickwork, showed through the leaf-laden trees. Margaret's pale, clear, spiritual face was turned towards them, her hands were clasped upon the window-sill; she leaned more forward still, and her long hair was stirred by the light wind.
"The one only thing he asks me for his sake," she murmured; "but O, how difficult, how impossible, never to look back, never voluntarily to look back upon the past again! To live for the present and the future, to live only in his life, as he lives only in mine. Ah, that is easy for him, or at least easier; and it may be so--but for me, for me." She swayed her slight figure to and fro, and wrung her hands. It was long since the gesture had ceased to be habitual now. "I will try, I will keep my word to you, in all honest intention at least, my darling, my love, my husband!" She slightly waved one hand towards the woods, and a beautiful flush spread itself over her face. "I will turn all my heart for ever from the past, if any effort of my will can do it, and live in your life only."
A few hours later, the quietest wedding that had ever been known in that part of the country took place in the parish church of Chayleigh, very much to the dissatisfaction of the few spectators who had had sufficient good fortune to be correctly informed of the early hour appointed for the ceremony.
"Gray silk, my dear, and a chip bonnet, as plain as you please," said Miss Laughton, the village dressmaker, to Miss Harland, the village milliner. "I should like to know what poor Mrs. Carteret, that's dead and gone, but had as genteel a taste in dress as ever I knew, would say to such a set-out as that."
"I expect, Jemima," replied Miss Harland, who had a strong dash of spite in her composition, and felt herself aggrieved at the loss of Mrs. Hungerford's modest custom in the article of widow's caps--"I expect madam would not have caught Mr. Baldwin easy, if Mrs. Carteret was alive; and gray silk and chip is good enough for her. I wonder what she wore at her wedding, when she ran away with Mr. Hungerford--which he was a gay chap, whatever they had to say against him."