"He wanted to speak to you before he went away, and I told him to wait. Better to wait—you were so young, you know."
"He did want to speak to me!" the girl exclaimed under her breath.
"Plenty of time," said Mr. Hayes. "He's young too. I told him he could come again to Mitchelhurst if he felt the same. I thought it was best—I thought it was best," he repeated, trying to drown a faint consciousness that to have parted with Barbara would have upset all his arrangements.
"I'm sure you did," she answered soothingly.
"I know your mother would say it was best—wouldn't she? Besides, I didn't do any harm, since you were thinking of the other one."
"He was here last," said Barbara.
"So he was," the sick man answered, with a flash of his old briskness. "And girls soon forget."
Barbara said nothing. What was the good of protestations? She would never utter a word against Reynold Harding—never. And what could she say about Adrian Scarlett? She had not owned to herself that she cared for him. If she did—and she was conscious of strong pulsations, which flushed her face, and filled her veins with tingling warmth—the more reason for silence. She laid a hand on the carved foliage of the post, and faced the dim figure propped in the bed. There was something grotesquely feeble about the little man's attitude. His face, discoloured and pale, drooped in the greenish shadow of the hangings, his unshaven chin rested on his breast, his parchment hands lay in a little nerveless heap on the counterpane before him. One would have said that he was set up in sport, as children set up dolls and nine-pins, on purpose to be knocked over.
"Hadn't you better lie down?" said Barbara, after considering him for a while. She wanted to speak tenderly, for the sake of the strange new gladness which was throbbing at her heart; yet the facts of sickness and hopeless decay had never seemed so distasteful. When he assented, she put her arm about him with the utmost care, but she could hardly help shrinking from the clutch of his chilly fingers on her wrist.
"Rothwells are a bad lot," he said, "bad and poor. Scarlett would be a better match. Some of his people have money."