"Poor papa!" her radiant face clouded a little, "he will miss me, but no—he couldn't refuse me anything if he tried—least of all this. Charley, I do thank you—dear, best cousin that ever was—with all my heart!"
She held out both hands, her heart full, and brimming over in her black eyes. For once in his life Charley Stuart forgot to be flippant and cynical. He held the hands gently, and he looked half-laughingly, half-compassionately into the flushed, earnest face.
"You poor child!" he said; "and you think the world outside this sea, and these sandhills, is all sunshine and coleur de rose. Well, think so—it's a harmless delusion, and one that won't last. And whatever betides," he said this earnestly, "whatever this new life brings, you'll never blame me, Edith, for having taken you away from the old one?"
"Never!" she answered. And she kept her word. In all the sadness—the shame, the pain of the after-time, she would never have gone back if she could—she never blamed him.
They walked on in silence. They were at the door of the ugly bleak house which Edith Darrell for eighteen years had called home, but which she was never to call home more. You would hardly have known her—so bright, so beautiful in a moment had Hope made her—a smile on her lips, her eyes like dark diamonds. For Charley, he watched her, as he might some interesting natural curiosity.
"When am I to be ready?" she asked him, softly, at the door.
"The sooner the better," he answered.
Then she opened it and went in.