For the first time that evening Annie burst out laughing. The boy threw his arms round her and gave her a sounding kiss.
“I’m so glad to hear you laugh again. You looked as if you would never laugh any more. And I’m so glad you’re come, so jolly glad!”
She was laughing and crying together now, as she drew the boy’s face to her and kissed his cheek.
“And I’m so glad you’re glad. We’ll have another game at shuttlecock to-morrow.”
“Oh, no,” he said earnestly; “I’ve got something better than that for you to-morrow. I’ve got a new terrier, the gamest you ever saw, and we’ll have the most splendid rat-hunt you ever were at in your life.”
CHAPTER VIII.
Annie did not find life at the Elms such a miserable affair as she had expected. That first evening the key-note was struck of the conduct of each member of the family toward her. Lady Braithwaite continued to treat her with distant coldness, or affected to ignore her entirely. Lilian followed suit, except at odd moments of capricious good humor, when she would treat her like a pretty child to be teased and caressed. George was kind, but instinct made her shun tête-à-têtes with him. She did not see much of Wilfred, who used to tell her that she made him ashamed of himself and promise to reform. He even went so far as to attend a temperance-meeting in the village, where, he declared afterward, that he heard a lot of things which were very true, and where he signed the pledge without being asked, in the hope of pleasing her; he was not quite sober at the time. When on his return home he went straight to the sideboard and mixed himself some whisky-and-water, Stephen reminded him of his vow; but Wilfred only said, softly: “Hang the pledge!” and went to bed in the same state as usual.
Stephen scarcely spoke to her. She soon found out that his admiration of Lilian, which she had noticed on her first visit to Garstone Grange, had grown into a mad passion which the object of it was not slow to make use of. He was her slave; she might snub him, torment him, hurt his sensitive feelings; nothing could change his devotion to her, which was very touching to Annie, who knew how hopeless his passion was, and that the handsome girl used her crippled lover only as a tool and a toy. For Lilian was a headstrong, willful girl, more difficult to manage than her mother and brothers guessed.
She had commissions to give her cousin which nobody else knew of, letters which she had to coax him to post, and answers to them which had to come under cover to him. And the poor young fellow never faltered in his allegiance, but, after a stormy war of words with her, which she knew how to end with a careless kiss brushed across his burning forehead, he always gave way; and her little secrets, whatever they might be, remained as safe as if no one but herself in the household knew of them.
One of these secrets, and perhaps the most important, had a narrow escape of being revealed one evening, however, when Annie and her constant companion, William, were standing still as statues in the large, wire-faced house where the rabbit-hutches were kept, amusing themselves by watching the mice play about, and finally run into the traps they had prepared for them.