“I have lived here for many years, but I am on the point of leaving. Bobby was my only tie to the Red House, or I should have gone long ago.”
“But now that the Baroness is so helpless surely you will delay your departure until she no longer needs you.”
“I shall not leave her until she has secured a better woman in my stead. But to tell you the truth, I am going to be married, Mrs. Pullen, and I consider my first duty is towards my future husband and his parents who are very old!”
“Oh! doubtless! May I ask his name?”
“Captain Hill! He lives in the next house to this—Stevenage! You are surprised, perhaps, that a man who has been in the army should marry a poor governess like myself. That is his goodness. I know that I am worn and faded and no longer young—thirty-three on my last birthday—but he is good enough to care for me all the more for the troubles I have passed through. Mine has been a chequered life, Mrs. Pullen, but I have told Captain Hill everything, and he still wishes to make me his wife! I ought to be a happy woman for the future, ought I not?”
“Indeed yes,” said Margaret, heartily, “and I sincerely hope that you may be so! But I can’t help thinking of poor Madame Gobelli! Is the Baron good to her?”
“Pretty well!” answered Miss Wynward, “but he is very stolid and unsympathetic! It is strange to think that her heart must have been bound up in that boy, and yet at times she was positively cruel to him!”
“It has all been permitted for some good purpose,” said Margaret, as she bade her farewell, “perhaps her remorse and self-accusation are the only things which would have brought her down upon her knees.”
She returned home considerably saddened by what she had seen, but in three days she was to accompany her husband to India, and in the bustle of preparation, and the joy of knowing that she was not to be separated from him again, her heart was comforted and at peace. Never once during that time did she give one thought to Harriet Brandt. Miss Wynward had hardly mentioned her name, and no one seemed to know where she had gone. The girl had passed out of their lives altogether.
Margaret only regretted one thing in leaving England—that she had not seen Anthony Pennell again. Colonel Pullen had called twice at his chambers, but had each time found him from home. Margaret wanted to put in a good word for the Baroness with him. She thought perhaps that he might see her, after a while, and speak a few words of comfort to her. But she was obliged to be content with writing her wishes in a farewell letter. She little knew how hardened Anthony Pennell felt, at that moment, against anyone who had treated the woman he loved in so harsh a manner.