“No, it is not good by,” he said suddenly. “Why should I be sent away?”
There was a quick change in his voice which set a hundred conflicting strings vibrating in her heart. How dared he speak in such a tone, and yet how dear it was! His strong feeling was carrying her with it, but she still found voice to say,—
“How can I know what you mean? How can you be one thing one day and another the next?” But Anthony disregarded the reproach. He said eagerly, “If you don’t love me, at least we are old friends; let us go back to what we were, and begin again. Don’t you think if you were to try very hard you might learn to like me a little bit, just a little bit?”
“I cannot learn to like you,” said Winifred, simply, “because we have always liked each other, and there can be no beginning again.” She said this very quietly, and then suddenly broke down. “O Anthony, Anthony,” she said, covering her face with her hands, “you have made it so difficult!”
And then she was in his arms. She had never consented, and yet he held her close to him. “My darling,” he said under his breath, “can you forgive me?”
Forgive him? Ah, yes, she loved him, and love will lavish forgiveness with a free hand, and a sweet joy in the bounty of its giving. If it were not so, how would it be with any of us? Was there ever such a moment,—so rich, so tender? And yet there must be better things, or Frank would not have been up there under the clump alone, there would not be so many sad hearts in the world, David Stephens would not have been lying under the grass.
Well, we shall know it all one day.
Very little has been said of late touching Marmaduke and his wife, the truth being that there is very little to say. They lived what must be called a prosperous life; at least, if there were any signs of disturbance in the midst of it, they were not such as became apparent to their neighbours. It was sometimes said that Mrs Lee was cold and distant, even with her husband, and that her looks had changed since her marriage, but her ill health was supposed to account satisfactorily for this, and nothing ever reached the ears of the outer world which could make it suppose that they were not a happy couple. Miss Philippa lived with them, by Mrs Lee’s especial request, and there could be no doubt of her happiness. But no children were born, and rumour declared, how truly it is impossible to say, that, after Mr and Mrs Lee died, their money would be bequeathed to a great London charity.
Anthony’s first attempt to find Margaret Hare’s husband and child had been checked by the despondency with which he had been visited when his world had lost its faith in him; but under a new spring of energy, he and Mr Robert were soon able to track the wanderers in Australia. Some of the circumstances were communicated to the father; he, however, utterly rejected all old Mr Tregennas’s intentions as a too late atonement. He was wealthy, and there was but one girl, and the certain hard determination which had carried him up in the struggle for existence now made him obstinately resolute against accepting his father-in-law’s money.
Anthony, Winifred, and their children live in London, but are often in Thorpe, where there are both living and dead to draw them, besides its own quiet and tender beauty. Anthony’s life was, perhaps, too soon filled with the things it wanted to admit of its ever becoming great in the manner in which people talk of greatness. But it is an exceedingly active and useful life, in the course of which he has made war upon more than one hydra-headed monster, and that with a success of which he often said his wife ought to share half the praise. She used to smile when she heard this, thinking of the many things which had helped her champion, besides her happy love. And, indeed, the influences that mould our lives are often scarcely known to ourselves, and come from as many sides as the winds that sweep the earth.