“Good-night.”
CHAPTER XXXV. ENGAGED
Well, there's the game. I throw the stakes.
Lady Cantourne was sitting alone in her drawing-room, and the expression of her usually bright and smiling face betokened considerable perturbation.
Truth to tell, there were not many things in life that had power to frighten her ladyship very much. Hers had been a prosperous life as prosperity is reckoned. She had married a rich man who had retained his riches while he lived and had left them to her when he died. And that was all the world knew of Lady Cantourne. Like the majority of us, she presented her character and not herself to her neighbours; and these held, as neighbours do, that the cheery, capable little woman of the world whom they met everywhere was Lady Cantourne. Circumstances alter us less than we think. If we are of a gay temperament—gay we shall be through all. If sombre, no happiness can drive that sombreness away. Lady Cantourne was meant for happiness and a joyous motherhood. She had had neither; but she went on being “meant” until the end—that is to say, she was still cheery and capable. She had thrown an open letter on the little table at her side—a letter from Jack Meredith announcing his return to England, and his natural desire to call and pay his respects in the course of the afternoon.
“So,” she had said before she laid the letter aside, “he is home again—and he means to carry it through?”
Then she had settled down to think, in her own comfortable chair (for if one may not be happy, comfort is at all events within the reach of some of us), and the troubled look had supervened.
Each of our lives is like a book with one strong character moving through its pages. The strong character in Lady Cantourne's book had been Sir John Meredith. Her whole life seemed to have been spent on the outskirts of his—watching it. And what she had seen had not been conducive to her own happiness.
She knew that the note she had just received meant a great deal to Sir John Meredith. It meant that Jack had come home with the full intention of fulfilling his engagement to Millicent Chyne. At first she had rather resented Sir John's outspoken objection to her niece as his son's wife. But during the last months she had gradually come round to his way of thinking; not, perhaps, for the first time in her life. She had watched Millicent. She had studied her own niece dispassionately, as much from Sir John Meredith's point of view as was possible under the circumstances. And she had made several discoveries. The first of these had been precisely that discovery which one would expect from a woman—namely, the state of Millicent's own feelings.