But Mabin, who felt hurt at this evident attempt to get rid of her, lingered, and offered the help of her arm to her friend. But to her astonishment and bitter annoyance, Mrs. Dale not only shrank from her, but cast upon the young girl a look full of resentment.
“Pray, don’t take so much trouble. I am quite, quite well,” she said coldly. “And I can walk alone, thank you.”
She had already withdrawn the arm Mabin had taken, and was plunging into the plantation with reckless steps, as if anxious to bury herself from observation. And she hastily put her handkerchief to her eyes and dashed away the tears which rose as she spoke.
Mabin drew herself up, and choked down a rising sob. What had she done that she should be treated like this? But the climax of her trouble came, when Rudolph, springing across the grass, and keeping his eyes still fixed anxiously on Mrs. Dale, as the little lady in black staggered blindly through the trees, touched her arm gently and whispered:
“You had better leave her for a little while, dear; she will be herself again presently.”
Mabin turned her back upon him, and marched off, without a word, in the direction of the house. He called to her to stop, to listen; but she would do neither. Wounded to the core, first by her friend, in whose cause she had been working, and then by her lover, she felt that she could not trust herself in the vicinity of either of them without an outbreak of grief or of anger to which her pride forbade her to give way.
She was in a whirl of feeling; she hardly saw the flowers or the trees as she walked; she scarcely knew whether she trod on grass or on gravel as she made her way straight into the house, shut herself up in her room, and sat down, in a passion of sullen resentment, by one of the high windows.
It seemed to her that she had sat there for hours, sore, perplexed, too miserable to think or to do anything but suffer, when her attention was attracted by a sound which made her start up and look out of the window. There, sauntering along between the broad beds of the kitchen-garden, stooping, from time to time, to hunt under the leaves for a late strawberry, or to gather a flower from the clumps of sweet-william and of clove-pinks which made a fragrant border to the more substantial products of the garden, was Mrs. Dale.
No longer melancholy, no longer silent, but bubbling over with high spirits, and laughing lightly at every other word of her companion, the lady in black looked more radiant than Mabin had ever before seen her, and appeared to be as light-hearted and incapable of serious thought as a child in the sunshine.
And her companion was Rudolph, who followed her, listened to her, laughed with her, and seemed thoroughly satisfied with her society.