“Yes; but I shall not be there,” said Maggie. “I shall only hear of that happiness. I am going away again; Lucy has not told you, perhaps?”
“Then the future will never join on to the past again, Maggie? That book is quite closed?”
The gray eyes that had so often looked up at her with entreating worship, looked up at her now, with a last struggling ray of hope in them, and Maggie met them with her large sincere gaze.
“That book never will be closed, Philip,” she said, with grave sadness; “I desire no future that will break the ties of the past. But the tie to my brother is one of the strongest. I can do nothing willingly that will divide me always from him.”
“Is that the only reason that would keep us apart forever, Maggie?” said Philip, with a desperate determination to have a definite answer.
“The only reason,” said Maggie, with calm decision. And she believed it. At that moment she felt as if the enchanted cup had been dashed to the ground. The reactionary excitement that gave her a proud self-mastery had not subsided, and she looked at the future with a sense of calm choice.
They sat hand in hand without looking at each other or speaking for a few minutes; in Maggie’s mind the first scenes of love and parting were more present than the actual moment, and she was looking at Philip in the Red Deeps.
Philip felt that he ought to have been thoroughly happy in that answer of hers; she was as open and transparent as a rock-pool. Why was he not thoroughly happy? Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.
Chapter XI.
In the Lane
Maggie had been four days at her aunt Moss’s giving the early June sunshine quite a new brightness in the care-dimmed eyes of that affectionate woman, and making an epoch for her cousins great and small, who were learning her words and actions by heart, as if she had been a transient avatar of perfect wisdom and beauty.