“But, Margaret, you surely are going to come to Hilcrest then,” appealed Ned, “whether you need rest or not!”
“We’ll see, Ned, we’ll see,” was all she would say, but this time her voice had lost its merriment.
Ned, though he did not know it, and though Margaret was loth to acknowledge it even to herself, had touched upon a tender point. She did long for Hilcrest, its rest, its quiet, and the tender care that its people had always given her. She longed for even one day in which she would have no problems to solve, no misery to try to alleviate—one day in which she might be the old care-free Margaret. She reproached herself bitterly for all this, however, and accused herself of being false to her work and her dear people; but in the next breath she would deny the accusation and say that it was only because she was worn out and “dead tired.”
“When the people do get home,” she said to Bobby McGinnis one day, “when the people do get home, we’ll take a rest, you and I. We’ll go up to Hilcrest and just play for a day or two. It will do us good.”
“To Hilcrest?—I?” cried the man.
“Certainly; why not?” returned Margaret quickly, a little disturbed at the surprise in her lover’s voice. “Surely you don’t think that the man I’m expecting to marry can stay away from Hilcrest; do you?”
“N-no, of course not,” murmured McGinnis; but his eyes were troubled, and Margaret noticed that he did not speak again for some time.
It was this, perhaps, that set her own thoughts into a new channel. When, after all, had she thought of them before together—Bobby and Hilcrest? It had always been Bobby and—the work.
CHAPTER XXXIV
It was on a particularly beautiful morning in June that Margaret and Patty started for New York—so beautiful that Margaret declared it to be a good omen.