“For his sake, the first.”
“And for my sake, the second?”
“That depends.”
“So it does. He must have found plenty of faults in me. But I was not so bad as he thought me when he stopped loving me.”
Margaret’s answer was one of her loving smiles, in which her eyes had more share than her lips.
It would have been unendurable to Euphra, a little while before, to find that she had a rival in a servant. Now she scarcely regarded that aspect of her position. But she looked doubtfully at Margaret, and then said:
“How is it that you take it so quietly?—for your love must have been very different from mine. Indeed, I am not sure that I loved him at all; and after I had made up my mind to it quite, it did not hurt me so very much. But you must have loved him dreadfully.”
“Perhaps I did. But I had no anxiety about it.”
“But that you could not leave to a father such as yours even to settle.”
“No. But I could to God. I could trust God with what I could not speak to my father about. He is my father’s father, you know; and so, more to him and me than we could be to each other. The more we love God, the more we love each other; for we find he makes the very love which sometimes we foolishly fear to do injustice to, by loving him most. I love my father ten times more because he loves God, and because God has secrets with him.”