“How good it is to get up so early,” thought Lucy, aloud; and then she stepped lightly over the dewy grass, marked down the spot where several mushrooms were growing, and then stepped on to the sandy road.
“I wish Moray would get up early,” she thought, “it would be so nice to have him for a companion; but, poor fellow, he must be tired of a morning. I know what I’ll do,” she cried suddenly. “I’ll get Glynne to promise to meet me two or three times a week, whenever it’s fine, and we’ll go together.”
Her cheeks flushed a little hot as she began to think about Glynne, and her thoughts ran somewhat in this fashion,—
“She doesn’t know—she doesn’t understand a bit, or she would never have consented. Oh! it’s absolutely horrid, and I don’t believe he cares for her a morsel more than she cares for him.”
Lucy stooped down to pick a mushroom, and laid it aside ready to retrieve as she came back from her walk, for Mrs Alleyne approved of a dish for breakfast.
“Why, at the end of a year it would be horrible,” cried Lucy, with emphasis. “Mrs Rolph! What would be the use of being married, if you were miserable, as I’m sure she would be.”
“It isn’t dishonourable; and if it is, I don’t mind. I know he is beginning to worship her, and it’s as plain as can be that she likes to sit and listen to him, and all he says about the stars. Why, she seems to grow and alter every day, and to become wiser, and to take more interest in everything he says and does.”
“There, I don’t care,” she panted, half-tearfully, as she picked another mushroom; and, as if addressing someone who had had spoken chidingly, “I can’t help it; he is my own dear brother, and I will help him as much as I can. Dishonourable? Not it. It is right, poor fellow! Why, she has come like so much sunshine in his life, and it is as plain as can be to see that she is gradually beginning to know what love really is.”
As these thoughts left her heart, she looked guiltily round, but there was no one listening—nothing to take her attention, but a couple of glistening, wet, and silvery-looking mushrooms in the grass hard by.
“It’s very dreadful of me to be thinking like this,” she said to herself, as she finished culling the mushrooms, and began to make her way back to the road, “but I can’t help it. I love Glynne, and I won’t see my own brother made miserable, if I can do anything to make him happy. It’s quite dreadful the way things are going, and dear Sir John ought to be ashamed of himself. I declare—Oh! how you made me start!”