Mr. Gage dropped the newspaper, and laughed without restraint, but he told Harriet that "she had now effectually frightened Miss Capel from ever coming to see her, when she was settled."
"Oh! I have provided against that;" said Harriet, "I don't know at all what Mr. Gage's plans are; but for myself, I mean to go to Wardenscourt early in the summer. Now I must have you solemnly promise, that directly I summon you, you will instantly join me there. You know Mrs. Fitzpatrick is connected with Lord Raymond, so that if she is invited, I suppose she will make no scruple of accepting; then we will really enjoy ourselves."
"I should like it very much," said Margaret.
"And you promise?"
"Yes, I do, indeed."
Margaret's approaching departure was a source of regret to every one. Harriet told her that they looked upon her as a kind of hostage for her own good behaviour, and that she had some ideas of the same kind herself. She was sure that she should do something outrageous when she was deprived of Margaret's overlooking eye. That neither she, nor Mr. Gage had at all made up their minds, and that she knew there would be a violent quarrel as soon as Margaret was out of the house.
Margaret thought, and said that if Mr. Gage meant to quarrel he would have begun already, for there was not a single means of aggravation that Harriet had left untried ever since her engagement with him.
Sometimes she affected to consider the engagement as a delusion of his own; sometimes she told Margaret that they had agreed to feign it as long as he stayed at Singleton Manor, in order to amuse him; at other times, she said, it was all very well while the fancy lasted, but that George would change his mind in a day or two, and so save her the trouble of formally breaking it off.
Mr. Gage took refuge in the newspaper from all these attacks, and did not seem to think it worth while to be ruffled. Mr. Humphries was constantly at the house during the few last days of Margaret's stay. He looked very sorrowful, but his attempts to propitiate her were confined to a variety of strange faces, and gestures, which to say the truth, she was too much occupied to remark. None regretted her so much as Mrs. Singleton; she had been so attentive to all her wants, and so skilful in making the old lady hear, that she felt in losing Margaret that she was parting with a luxury she could ill afford to do without.