"How is she ever to get on if she takes things as badly as this? I wish I could help her. I know so exactly how she must be feeling."
But imagine him now confronted with a figure that shone with happiness, with success, with splendour!
She caught his arm—"Come, Uncle John, we won't dance. We'll talk. Up here—There's no one in this room."
She ran ahead of him, found a corner for them both, and then, pushing him on to a sofa, twisted round in front of him, turning on her toes, flashing laughter at him, sitting down at last beside him, and then kissing him.
"Oh, my dear! I'm so glad," he said. "I thought you were miserable."
"So I was—at first—perfectly wretched. Now it's all splendid—glorious!"
This was to him an entirely new Rachel. In her movement, her excitement, her immediate glad acceptance of the life that an hour ago she had feared with such alarm, he perceived an element that was indeed foreign to all things Beaminster. And this new attitude reminded him with renewed sharpness that he could not now hope to hold the old Rachel with the intimate affection that had been his before. She was slipping from him—slipping ... even as he watched her, she was going.
She laid her hand upon his arm: "Uncle John, I'm a success! I am really. I can dance, dance beautifully! I can put these young men in their places. They're frightened!... really frightened."
"Of course—you're lovely—the biggest success there's ever been. But what was the matter with you at dinner?"
"Yes. Wasn't that dreadful? Everything went wrong, and the only thing I could think of was how glad grandmamma would be. I had a kind of paralysis."