Sad, wearisome days they were to Molly: mental labor was next to impossible; she could not even read with any enjoyment; her heart was heavy with grief and unsatisfied longing, intensified by her mother's constant reiteration, "You've offended him, and he'll never come again; you've thrown away the best chance a girl ever had; and you'll never see another like it."
Then it was unusually long since she had heard from Dick; and she had waited for news from a manuscript which had cost her months of hard work, and on which great expectations were based, till her heart was sick with hope deferred.
It was on the morning of the fourth day that Molly, having persuaded her mother to go for a walk with her grandfather and Mrs. Carrington, summoned a servant and desired to be taken out into the grounds.
She sat motionless in her chair gazing in mournful silence on all the luxuriant beauty that surrounded her, while the man wheeled her up one walk and down another.
At length, "That will do, Joe," she said; "you may stop the chair under that magnolia yonder, and leave me there for an hour."
"I'se 'fraid you git tired, Miss Molly, and nobody roun' for to wait on you," he remarked when he had placed her in the desired spot.
"No; I have the bell here, and it can be heard at the house. I have a book, too, to amuse myself with: and the gardener yonder is within sight. You need not fear to leave me."
He walked away and she opened her book. But she scarcely looked at it. Her thoughts were busying themselves with something else, and her eyes were full of tears.
A quick, manly step on the gravel walk behind her startled her and sent a vivid color over face and neck.
"Good morning, Miss Percival; I am fortunate indeed in finding you here alone," a voice said, close at her side.