“God bless you, Dora. You have made me very happy. I was beginning to think it could not be, and was learning to live without you, but that makes my joy the greater. God bless my Dora, and show me how to make her happy!”
Had the Squire followed the promptings of his nature he would have caressed her lovingly, just as he did Margaret when she stood thus beside him; but remembering Johnnie’s warnings, he desisted, and it was well he did, else Dora had hated him. Now she suffered him to wind his arms around her, while he told her again how happy she had made him, and blessed her for it.
“Dora,” he said, and now he smoothed her hair, “a man of forty is not called old, and I am only that, but I am fourteen years your senior, while my six children make me seem older still, but my heart is young, and I will try so hard to stay with you till you too are old. I’ll go with you wherever you wish to go, do anything you like, and never frown upon the things which I know young girls love. I will not be an ogre guarding my girlish wife, but a proud, happy husband, doing that wife’s bidding.”
Dora could not repress her tears, he spoke so kindly, so earnestly, and she knew he meant all he was saying, while she was deceiving him. She did not think either that she was doing very wrong in thus deceiving him. It was her duty to be his wife, and it was not her duty to analyze her feelings in his sight, unless he asked her for such analysis, which he was not likely to do, for his was not a mind quick to perceive, while suspicion was something to which he was a total stranger. He had always admired Dora, and latterly he had learned to love her devotedly, feeling now that his affection was in part returned, else she had not deliberately come to him and said, “I will be your wife.” It made him very happy to know she had said so, and in his happiness he failed to notice the pallor of her face, the drooping of her swollen eyelids, and her apparent wish to get as far from him as possible. Margaret had never been demonstrative, and he hardly expected Dora to be different, so the poor, deluded man was satisfied, and when Dora, who would have everything settled at once, said to him:
“We will wait a year,—till next autumn,” he knew what she meant, and answered readily.
“Yes, if you like, though Margaret said it did not matter how soon, the earlier the better for the children’s sake.”
“I’d rather it should be a year,” was Dora’s quiet reply, to which the Squire assented, and then, though he so much wished her to stay, he opened the door for her to pass out, as he saw that she desired it.
Half an hour later and Bell Verner, who was just falling to sleep, was startled by a knock, and Dora asked permission to enter.
“What is it? Who’s come?” Jessie asked in a dreamy tone, lifting her curly head from the pillow, just as Bell unlocked the door, and Dora stepped into the room.
She was very calm now and decided. The matter was fixed now beyond recall, and she felt a great deal better. Sitting down upon the foot of the bed, she said to Bell and Jessie: