“Ah!” said Ned, with a look down at his boots and a nod. “Yes, I’ll come, vicar, and thank you kindly for your invitation,” he said, more graciously. “I can’t make hay, but I’ll be most happy to stand about and look pretty,” he added, with a short laugh.
Raising his hat ceremoniously to Mrs. Brander, whom he admired, and whose indifferently concealed dislike therefore irritated him, Ned Mitchell turned on his heel without so much as a glance at Vernon, and made his way down the hill to his cottage, leaning on the arm of Abel Squires, who had bade “t’ gentle fowk” a humble and bashful farewell, and hastened to the support of his patient, upon whom the fatigue and excitement of the evening had begun to tell heavily.
Solemnly and almost in silence, Meredith Brander and his wife then parted from Vernon, who took his lonely way over the fields in a state of suppressed excitement so acute that on reaching St. Cuthbert’s Vicarage he was highly feverish, with a burning head, hot, dry hands, and a mouth that seemed parched and withered. He lay awake for the greater part of the night. Next morning, his old housekeeper, not hearing him rise as usual, went up to his room, and found him in a restless, uneasy sleep. Seeing that something was wrong with him, and deciding that it was the result of overwork, Mrs. Warmington applied a characteristically rough-and-ready remedy. She ransacked his wardrobe, selecting everything that was fit to wear, and quitted the room as softly as she had entered it, leaving pinned to his pillow the following note:—
“I see you have had no sleep and are unwell. So I have taken away your clothes and locked the door. If you are ready to promise to stay in bed all the morning, and not to go out to-day, knock three times, and I will bring up your breakfast.”
When he woke up, Vernon gave the three knocks, after very little hesitation. He felt so ill that he was glad of an excuse to spend an idle day—glad too that in this way he could escape the ordeal of the haymaking at his brother’s, and a meeting with Olivia Denison. For, haunted as he was by the remembrance of her gentle touch, of her softly uttered words of sympathy as he sat beside her by Mrs. Warmington’s fireside, he felt that another cold look, another frigid bow, like those she had given him on their last meeting, would be a torture more than he could bear.
Vernon Brander was far too ignorant of the peculiarities of the feminine character to know the significance of that coldness; he thought that it meant in her what it meant in him, a firm determination that all sentiment between them should be for ever at an end. While, as every one knows, if that had been the case she would have been gentle, tender, anxious to soften the cruel blow she was preparing for him, anxious also that there should, after the parting, be a little sentiment left. As it was, poor Olivia, on her side, was suffering a good many torments. While never allowing herself to believe the worst she heard against Vernon Brander, her common sense was continually warring with her feelings, and calling her all sorts of unflattering names for her prejudice in his favor. She hated and despised him, she loved and respected him, all in a breath. She resolved never to see him again, she determined to encourage him in spite of all opposition, in the course of the same day. But the value of the former resolution may be gauged by the fact that she made it very strongly on the morning of the haymaking, and was bitterly disappointed when, on arriving with her father and step-mother at the big field by the churchyard, where the tent had been put up, she learnt from little Kate that he had sent word to say he could not come.
But Olivia was not to go without admirers. Approaching the tent as she came out of it was Fred Williams, dressed in a light grey suit of a check so large that there was only room for one square and a half across his narrow little chest, a very pale brown hat, and a salmon-colored tie. He greeted Mr. Denison effusively, and asked Olivia if he might get her a cup of tea.
“No, thank you,” said she, coldly.
But her father, surprised and displeased at her tone, interfered.
“Yes, my dear, I am sure you would like a cup of tea,” said he.