“Ah, but then he is my husband!” returned she, offering him an apple.
“I say, Annie, you don’t like Harry, do you?” he asked, mysteriously, after a pause.
“Of course I do! How can you ask me such a question?” said the outraged wife indignantly.
“Oh, well, I don’t believe you do, all the same!” said he, obstinately. “And I don’t wonder! If I were you, I would let him run away, and then you could get rid of him and marry somebody nicer.”
“Do you know what you are talking about?” asked Annie, haughtily, drawing herself up with as much dignity as the maintenance of her balance on the top rail of a five-barred gate would allow.
“Yes, quite well, Annie dear; I am saying it only for your good,” said he, his boyish sense of humor peeping out in spite of his being really half in earnest.
And then they laughed themselves off the gate.
For this was how the regime of coldness and neglect on the part of her husband, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law had turned out. It had thrown Mrs. Harold Braithwaite upon the society of her youngest brother-in-law, and made of her a melancholy statue in the house, a happy hoiden out of it. The only thing she was careful of was to avoid the scenes of the daily walks of her late pupils during their out-of-school hours, as she told William it might have a bad moral effect upon them to see their late governess scrambling up banks, and in other undignified situations.
She was out of doors nearly all day, it not having yet occurred to Lady Braithwaite to torment her daughter-in-law, who was very submissive to her, by making her stay in to help to entertain chance visitors. She got two invitations, however, with the other ladies, and endured with them and George a dull dinner-party, and with them, without George, a duller afternoon tea, at both of which she was much admired and looked upon as a pretty child. Her style of beauty led to this mistake; she was so small, so low-voiced, had such fresh-colored, rounded cheeks, and such timid though pretty manners that nobody suspected the strength of will, and ambition, and other deep-seated qualities, of which their young possessor was herself scarcely aware. They lay dormant indeed just now. The uppermost side of her many-sided nature at present was a buoyancy of spirit which made a lad scarcely sixteen her favorite companion, and a wild delight in having escaped from the shackles of the schoolroom on the one hand, and of lodging alone with a sulky, ignorant husband on the other.
And, just when her heart began to cry out for something more than this, she made a discovery which sent her to her knees in utter joy and thankfulness to Heaven. No more ennui, no more repining now; even in the house the gravity of her little face gave place to an expression full of hope and sweetness, while, once escaped from silent submission and Lady Braithwaite, her eyes would dance and her lips break into soft song, till William declared he did not know what had come over her, and confessed one day, with a lump in his throat when she stopped to rest on a felled tree, that he believed she was going to die and go to heaven.