“Lilian is abroad. I don’t know whether she has heard anything about it yet.”
“Well, say what you like, as long as you make him take it.”
“And you are quite sure the want of it will not inconvenience you?”
“You are as sensitive for Harry as he is for himself. Look at the luxury I am surrounded by,” and Annie pointed gayly to the bouquets and fruit on the table. “Doesn’t all this speak for itself? The money, you understand, comes from somebody else; but you may take him this from me;” and with nervous, trembling fingers she pulled out from their companions a spray of jasmine and a crimson azalea, fastened them together, and put them into his hands as he left the room.
“I am afraid that poor fellow is going to die,” she thought, as she listened to his slow footsteps and the thud of his crutch upon the stairs; “I never saw him look so ill as he did to-day. I wonder where he lives? He cannot be in want—I know he has money enough to keep him, and Harry even, with the money I send him, would have enough for them both. Poor fellow!”
She and Stephen had never been very good friends—indeed at the Grange he had disliked her, and she had never felt for him any warmer sentiment than pity, mingled with contempt for the slavish nature of his devotion to Lilian. His unselfish worship of the cold, proud girl had its nobler side, she knew; but she could not forgive the meanness of the actions to which he would stoop for his cousin’s sake. But, now that Lilian had cast him aside like an old glove, and he appeared before Annie broken in health and forlorn, the tears came into her eyes as she thought of his wasted life, and she would have done anything in the world to smooth his rough lot for him by her sympathy or her care. But he shrunk from both, and left her each time dejected but stubborn, with the shy reserve which characterized his attitude toward most people even more marked than usual in his conversations with her.
She was feeling rather heart-sick at her inability to do anything for the members of her husband’s family, from most of whom she had received great kindness, when one day she saw Sir George getting out of a hansom in Piccadilly. He was looking careworn and harassed, Annie thought; but he seemed glad to see her; and, when she begged him to come to luncheon the next day he said he should be delighted, but she must be prepared to find him more of a bore than ever.
“Well, if you bore me, I shall take the privilege of an old acquaintance and go to sleep,” said she, laughing.
The next day he appeared punctually in her sitting-room, and she was even more struck than she had been on the previous day by the deep lines in his handsome face and the cloud which seemed to hang over him. She exerted herself as she had never done before to be lively and amusing; she had prepared the daintiest of luncheons, and before it was over she had the satisfaction of hearing him laugh like a man without a care. Not a particle of this delicate welcome was lost upon the keen man of the world, and, when luncheon was over, he said:
“That is the first meal I have laughed over for more than two months—since you left the Grange, in fact.”