"We shall live this down, I think," said Mattie, confidently. "After all, there's nothing very serious about it—if he don't suspect us of behaving wrongly on that night."
"Sidney suspect that of me! Oh! no, no—not so bad as that!"
"Then it will all come right in time," cried Mattie. "He has loved us all his life, and will not fling himself from us in his pride and anger, as—as other men would do, more selfish and unjust than he. I see the future brightening—we will wait patiently, and not be cast down by this slight trouble."
"Slight trouble!" exclaimed Harriet. "Oh! Mattie, if you only understood what love was like, you would guess my—my sense of desolation."
Harriet flung herself on the bosom of the old faithful friend, whose face, over her shoulder, became suddenly, and for an instant only, very white and lined.
"I will try and guess," she said, in a low voice. "It must be desolate; I—I may know better some day!"
Then Mattie set herself the task of comforting this child—a child still, she thought, in her impulsiveness, and in that weakness which gave way like a child at the first trouble, and sought help and comfort from others, rather than from her own heart. And Mattie, who had the gift—that rare rich gift above all price—of comforting those who are afflicted, succeeded in putting the facts of the case in their best and less distorted light, and was rewarded before the interview was over—and when Harriet remembered it—by the new fact of how one revelation had brought about another, and cleared up the mystery of Mattie's absence from home to the man who had suspected her.
"I broke the promise—there was nothing to keep back, when I had my own story to relate."
"He knows all this," said Mattie, "and he——"
"He is very sorry for all that harshness which drove you from us—I am sure of it."