A Milestone.
It was all over. Ned had gone away, and the diamond ring no longer shone on Lilias’s left hand. In a storm of tears and sobs she had declared to her mother that she neither could nor would keep true to her engagement, and Ned had received the intelligence with grave composure.
“She made a mistake!” he said quietly. “We both made a mistake. I cannot blame her, for I was in fault myself. What we thought was love, was but the attraction of youth and good spirits, which could not stand the strain of adversity. Don’t be hard on Lilias, Mrs Rendell. I should be sorry that she should suffer any more on my account. It has been a painful experience for her.”
But Mrs Rendell closed her lips in a stern silence, and had no word of pity for her daughter. It shocked her proud heart that one of her girls should have behaved in a manner so unworthy the precept which she had endeavoured to teach, for she knew well that Lilias would have felt no qualms in preparing for her marriage, if Ned’s story had been one of success instead of failure.
What Mrs Rendell thought she was accustomed to say, and Lilias came away from the important interview smarting with mortification and wounded vanity. She tried to think that the worst was over; but the bitterest moment was yet to come, when she met her father—the gentlest and most forbearing of men, who was so slow to blame that his children could count the reproofs of a lifetime on the fingers of one hand—and he looked at her with a strange, cold glance, in which was no trace of the old fond admiration.
“What’s this I hear about you, Lilias?” he asked sternly. “I’m not proud of you, my dear, not proud at all! I did not think that a daughter of mine could have behaved in such an unwomanly manner. Your affection seems good only for fair weather. Talbot is well rid of such a wife!”
It was not much, and it was the only reference to the broken engagement which she ever heard from his lips, but it pierced the girl’s heart as no other reproach could have done. The relationship between a father and a daughter is a very sacred and beautiful one, and the consciousness of his pride in her, his barely concealed satisfaction in the admiration she excited, had been one of her most cherished joys. The thought that her father was ashamed of her made Lilias wince with pain, nor did her sisters’ reception of the news help to restore her composure.
Maud’s principle in life was to say nothing, if it were impossible to say what was agreeable; but Nan made up for this silence by the candour of her denunciation. The two girls came face to face at the top of the stairs, an hour after the great news had circulated through the house, and mutually stopped to gaze in each other’s face.
“W–ell?” queried Lilias timidly. “You’ve heard! Mother has told you. What do you—what do you think about it?”
Nan closed her eyes, and tilted her chin in the air.