‘You are hopeless—so unpractical—so heroic in your ideas!’ he said. ‘And there is your father coming. Pray don’t favour him with such remarks as you have just made to me, or he may say that if I am too good for my place I can leave it, and then I wonder where I should be.’
Nita was silent, her breast heaving. Mr. Bolton came up, and Jerome repeated his news to him too. He received it with a calmness which his daughter thought barbarous. They all three went into the house. That evening ‘as it is the last,’ both Nita and Jerome said, he sang for them again. John was not there, nor Miss Shuttleworth. The visits of both had become less frequent. Jerome was not sorry, and Nita, carried onwards by her changed state of mind, was hardly conscious of it.
She sat quite alone in the drawing-room, on the following evening. It was Friday—a busy day with her father, who was in Manchester, attending a meeting, and who would not return till the last train at night. She had heard John promise to go to Monk’s Gate and sit an hour with Wellfield—‘by way of a housewarming,’ the latter had said, with a sarcastic little laugh. Miss Shuttleworth had a class of village girls on this particular evening. Nita therefore found herself in the strange and unwonted position of being absolutely alone.
The stillness of the house grew oppressive to her, as the hours passed by. It grew dark, and she sat alone. The day had been chilly and dull, for the weather had suddenly changed, and the sun had not once during the whole day shone out. Speedwell couched at her feet, and the lamp was lighted and the shutters closed, to shut out the dark trees and the shadowy garden.
As she sat thus alone, feeling her heart very desolate, the door was opened, and John Leyburn came in.
‘John, you!’ she exclaimed, springing up and running to meet him—‘I thought you were going to Monk’s Gate.’
‘So I am: on my way there now. But you didn’t think I should go without looking in upon you—and your father away. You look remarkably desolate.’
‘Do I? Everyone has gone, and it is dull.’
‘If I had thought of it, I wouldn’t have gone to see Wellfield to-night. I would have come and sat with you, my dear. Are you cold, Nita? What’s the matter? Where’s your little red shawl? and why don’t you have a fire?’