"No, no, don't leave me, Mattie! You must remain. I have been ill. I—I am very weak."
"If you wish it, for a little while. You two are not enemies now—let me see you shake hands, then?"
The old sweethearts shook hands together at Mattie's wish, and then stood shyly looking at each other, each too discomfited, even troubled, to say a word. Mattie had one more part to play before she could escape them.
CHAPTER IX.
MATTIE, MEDIATRIX.
Harriet Wesden was strangely afraid of the old lover—what he would say to her in the first moments of meeting, whether he would speak of the past in which she had been misjudged, of the present hour which had brought them face to face, or of the future for them both, and what it would be like from that day.
She was afraid to speak, afraid to trust herself with him, and she clung closer to the skirt of the old friend, a child still in moments of emergency, as she had ever been. Sidney Hinchford stood perplexed, amazed—what could he say in the presence of the woman to whom he had been talking about marriage?—what dared he say were she even to leave them to fight out their explanations their own way?
Mattie read the fear of one, and exaggerated in her imagination the reserve of the other; even then all might be marred, and all her efforts end in nothing, if she were not quick to act.
"I asked Sidney, as you entered, Harriet, if it were not something more than chance that brought you two together to-day—that brought him hither, in particular," she said; "I think it is—I trust that from to-day a brighter life opens for you both. Why should it not?—you who have kept so long asunder from each other, only require an honest mediator to pave the way for a fair explanation. Both of you will have faith in Mattie!"