"I dare say you are right, mamma," she said in a low dreamy tone, looking not at her stepmother, but straight before her into vacancy, as if her tearless eyes ware transfixed by the vision of all her shattered hopes, filling with wreck and ruin the desolate foreground of a blank future. "I dare say you are right, mamma; it was very foolish of me to think that Edward––that Captain Arundel could care for me, for––for––my own sake; but if––if he wants my fortune, I should wish him to have it. The money will never be any good to me, you know, mamma; and he was so kind to papa in his poverty––so kind! I will never, never believe anything against him;––but I couldn't expect him to love me. I shouldn't have offered to be his wife; I ought only to have offered him my fortune."
She heard her lover's footstep in the quadrangle without, in the stillness of the summer morning, and shivered at the sound. It was less than a quarter of an hour since she had been walking with him up and down that cloistered way, in which his footsteps were echoing with a hollow sound; and now––––. Even in the confusion of her anguish, Mary Marchmont could not help wondering, as she thought in how short a time the happiness of a future might be swept away into chaos.
"Good–night, mamma," she said presently, with an accent of weariness. She did not look at her stepmother (who had turned away from her now, and had walked towards the open window), but stole quietly from the room, crossed the hall, and went up the broad staircase to her own lonely chamber. Heiress though she was, she had no special attendant of her own: she had the privilege of summoning Olivia's maid whenever she had need of assistance; but she retained the simple habits of her early life, and very rarely troubled Mrs. Marchmont's grim and elderly Abigail.
Olivia stood looking out into the stony quadrangle. It was broad daylight now; the cocks were crowing in the distance, and a skylark singing somewhere in the blue heaven, high up above Marchmont Towers. The faded garlands in the banqueting–room looked wan in the morning sunshine; the lamps were burning still, for the servants waited until Mrs. Marchmont should have retired, before they entered the room. Edward Arundel was walking up and down the cloister, smoking his second cigar.
He stopped presently, seeing his cousin at the window.
"What, Livy!" he cried, "not gone to bed yet?"
"No; I am going directly."
"Mary has gone, I hope?"
"Yes; she has gone. Good–night."
"Good morning, my dear Mrs. Marchmont," the young man answered, laughing. "If the partridges were in, I should be going out shooting, this lovely morning, instead of crawling ignominiously to bed, like a worn–out reveller who has drunk too much sparkling hock. I like the still best, by–the–bye,––the Johannisberger, that poor John's predecessor imported from the Rhine. But I suppose there is no help for it, and I must go to bed in the face of all that eastern glory. I should be mounting for a gallop on the race–course, if I were in Calcutta. But I'll go to bed, Mrs Marchmont, and humbly await your breakfast–hour. They're stacking the new hay in the meadows beyond the park. Don't you smell it?"