Prudence pushed back her chair and stood up.
“I’ll go home,” she said. “I’ll go to-day—now. I don’t think that Edward has a right to expect me to many him against my will. I’ll go home.” She gripped the back of her chair hard, and met Mrs Morgan’s unfriendly eyes with no sign of yielding in her look. “I know you are angry with me,” she added. “They’ll be angry at home. I can’t help that. I deserve it. But to do as you wish wouldn’t help matters. It would be another mistake. I couldn’t make him happy.”
“You will never make any one happy,” Mrs Morgan said, “because you are utterly selfish.”
Chapter Twenty Nine.
Prudence was not allowed to return home that day as she wished to do. Old Mrs Morgan insisted upon writing first to Mr Graynor to prepare him for his daughter’s unexpected return, and to explain the reason for her travelling before the original date and alone. In the circumstances it was impossible that Mr Morgan should accompany her.
Prudence dreaded the sending of this letter. She feared as the result of its dispatch that some member of her family would arrive to take her home like a child who is in disgrace. She retired to her room and spent the greater part of the day in tears till her face was disfigured and her eyelids swollen with weeping, so that Mrs Henry, when she called during the afternoon, could not fail to detect these signs of distress. Old Mrs Morgan was too upset to receive any one; and Prudence entertained the mystified visitor alone, and in response to repeated probings, explained the situation to her in jerky incomplete sentences which conveyed nothing very clearly, save the fact that she wished to end her engagement and that the Morgans would not agree to this on account of what people would say.
Mrs Henry’s primary emotion, when this point became clear, revealed itself in a vindictive gratification in her mother-in-law’s discomfiture. Apart from that she kept an open mind on the subject. She liked Prudence. She would have preferred that Edward should not upset her own arrangements by taking to himself a wife, but, since he was inclined that way, she thoroughly approved his choice, and had become reconciled to the thought of his marriage. She scarcely knew whether to feel relieved or disappointed at this unexpected turn of affairs. But she was frankly amused. The picture of old Mrs Morgan, amazed and angry, fussing in irreconcilable distress over what people would say, filled her with indescribable satisfaction.
“They can’t make you marry against your will,” she said reassuringly.