“How sad his mother seems!” remarked another; “and the boy himself looks dreadfully ill.”
“Miss Griselda says he is one of the most wiry and athletic little fellows she ever came across,” said a third lady.
And then a fourth remarked in a somewhat fretful tone:
“I wish that good Miss Lovel would present him to us and get it over. One gets perfectly tired of waiting for one doesn’t know what.”
Just then there was a disturbance and a little hush. Some fresh visitors had arrived—some visitors who came on foot and approached through the forest. Miss Griselda, feeling she could wait no longer for Mr. Baring’s arrival, had just taken Phil’s hand and was leading him forward to greet her many guests, when the words she was about to say were arrested by the sudden appearance of these strangers on the scene.
Mr. Baring was one of them; but nobody noticed, and in their intense excitement nobody recognized, the sleek little lawyer. A lady, dressed quietly, with a gentle, calm, and gracious bearing, came first. At sight of her Rachel uttered a cry; she was the lady of the forest. Rachel flew to her and, unrestrained by even the semblance of conventionality, took her hand and pressed it rapturously to her lips.
“At last!” half-sobbed Rachel—“at last I see you, and you don’t turn away! Oh, how I have loved you! how I have loved you!”
“And I you, my darling—my beloved.”
“Kitty, come here,” called out Rachel. “Kitty, Kitty, this is the lady of the forest!”
“And your mother, my own children. Come to my heart.”