“Though I do like her,” he said, “and always shall; but I intend to be loyal to you, Allie, and mean to make you happy, and I want you to remember that, and not flare up every time I happen to look at a girl.”
And Alice promised that she would not, and took his proffered kiss of reconciliation very graciously, and when, in the early dusk of the warm summer night, I walked up to the Hill to call on the young ladies, I found the engaged pair sitting by themselves at the far end of the piazza, Alice with her hand clasping Godfrey’s arm, while she told him something to which he seemed to listen in a preoccupied kind of way, as if he hardly knew what she was saying to him.
CHAPTER XL.
ROBERT MACPHERSON INTERVIEWS GERTIE.
Gertie was quite well the next day, and took her usual place at the table, and when breakfast was over and Godfrey and the young ladies had gone to ride, she strolled out to the little cemetery, which looked so cool and inviting with the white marble gleaming through the evergreens and climbing vines. Scarcely was she seated there when she heard footsteps near, and saw Robert Macpherson coming rapidly toward her.
“Excuse me,” he said, “I have followed you here because I wanted to be alone while I gave you something, and told you something which should have been told and given before, only,—” he paused a moment, looking both embarrassed and distressed, and then continued hastily: “I am a coward and a fool! Gertie, were you ever ashamed to tell who you were?”
“What do you mean?” Gertie asked, looking curiously at him.
“I mean that my blood is a little mixed,” he answered, “but I will explain that by and by, and now to my business. I think you have several times pressed flowers which grew on this grave” (pointing to Abelard’s), “and sent them to his mother.”
“Yes. I have pressed them for Mrs. Schuyler to send two or three times when she had not the leisure, and have written for her to the sweet-faced old lady of whom she once told me,” Gertie said, and Robert rejoined: “I saw that old lady when I was abroad the last time, and when she heard I was coming here she told me of Mrs. Schuyler, whom she had seen, and of the ‘bonnie young lassie’ who took such care of her boy’s grave, and sent her flowers from it, and she wrote you a letter, Gertie, because she said you seemed very near to her, and she sent you some ‘Cairngorms’ for a necklace and earrings. They have been in the family for years, and she intended them for her oldest grand-daughter, but she died, and there is no other, so she sent them to you, knowing that Mrs. Schuyler can have far more precious stones, though I think these very handsome; they are almost as fine as a topaz,—look,” and he handed her a box in which were several very fine Cairngorms of that variety found in Aberdeenshire.
“Oh, how pretty, how beautiful!” Gertie exclaimed, holding them to the light. “And she sent them to me? I do not understand it.”