At that point Agatha rose to her feet and looked indignantly at her relatives. For a moment there was danger of an outbreak of offended pride, but by an effort the girl controlled herself and said, simply:
"Please don't do it any more. I shall feel hurt if you offer again to read to me anything you may have written. If you will excuse me I think I will go to my room now. I am not strong to-day."
It was the custom of the good ladies to protest that they "never could understand Agatha;" but on this occasion they understood her sufficiently to know that they had trodden very near a danger-line which they were more than unwilling to cross.
Baillie Pegram in his turn was by no means minded to submit to the manifest purpose of The Oaks ladies that he should hear nothing about Agatha, beyond what Marshall Pollard had reported to him during the two days of his stay at Warlock. Marshall had gone now, and Baillie wrote in response to the second of the notes:
"I am getting well quite as rapidly as my best friends could wish. There is not the slightest occasion for uneasiness about me. I am even permitted to ride horseback a little. But I am exceedingly anxious for tidings of Miss Agatha, whom you have not mentioned in either of your notes. Will you not send me word concerning her, or better still, if she is well enough to write, will you not ask her to send me a few lines? My gratitude to her for all that she has done for me is very great, and so is my anxiety to know that she is recovering from the painful illness which was caused by her generous self-sacrifice in my behalf."
As Agatha had asked her aunts not to read to her their letters to the master of Warlock, those ladies chose to interpret her request as including his letter to them. They made no mention of the fact that he had written to make inquiries concerning her. She wondered a little that he had not done so, but on the whole, she argued, it was better so.
Baillie was not so easily pleased. He chafed when the next note came from The Oaks, bringing no tidings from Agatha, and when still another of like character followed it, he grew uneasy, lest the silence might mean that Agatha had herself forbidden all mention of her in letters from The Oaks.
"She is taking that method, probably," he argued, "of dismissing me again, and letting me know that I must not presume upon the service she has done me. What a fool I am, to be sure! I have been reckoning upon her devotion to me in my illness and captivity as proof that what I brutally blurted out at Fairfax Court-house was not unwelcome to her after all. With her quick feminine perceptions, she has discovered how I have been misinterpreting her duty doing, and she wants now to show me my error in the simplest way possible."
As he meditated, the soldier impulse in him asserted itself,—the impulse to dare the worst in the hope of achieving the best.
Acting upon that impulse he immediately wrote a note to Agatha, and sent it by Sam, with orders to deliver it to her in person, if possible, and at all events to ask for an answer and fetch it.