A little longer.”
She had spent her life in waiting for him to return to her, but he had not yet done so; the man who had gone forth loving her, and with her promise to love him, had not returned to her and her love. She would have to wait a little longer.
But somehow she did not now feel impatient to see him once again at her feet. The terrible sense of loneliness that had fallen on her when he had left her presence on the day after his arrival at the Court—that appalling consciousness of desertion—was no longer experienced by her. She awoke from her few hours' sleep on the morning after Clare had come to her, without her previous feeling of being alone in the world. Her first thought now was that in half an hour she would be seated at the breakfast-table opposite to that sweet girl who had been sent to her by a kind Fate, just at the moment when she needed her most.
Before the half hour had quite passed she was sitting opposite to Clare; and before another hour had passed she was sitting by the side of Clare in her phaeton, pointing out to her the various landmarks round that part of Brackenshire, as the ponies trotted along the road. Agnes felt as happy as though she had succeeded in solving the problem of how to win back an errant lover.
“It's not a bit like the England of my fancy,” cried Clare, when the phaeton had been driven on for some miles beyond the little town of Brackenhurst.
“Is it possible that this is the first glimpse you have had of England?” cried Agnes.
“It is practically my first glimpse of England. I could not have been more than a year old when I was taken abroad.”
“And yet I am sure that you had all an exile's longing to return to England—you learned to allude to it as home, did you not?” said Agnes.
“Oh, of course, I always thought of England as home, though I managed to live very happily wherever I found myself,” replied the girl. “Sometimes when I was suddenly brought face to face with a party of English men and women making a tour of Italy, my longing to be in England was easily repressed. Indeed I may safely say that at no time did I feel very patriotic. The greater number of the people whom I met painted such a picture of England as reconciled me to live abroad.”
“You do not recognize the country from their description?”