It was a very low little yes, almost a whisper, but at the sound of it Maud shrank as at a blow, and her face became drawn with pain. For the first time a realisation of what the news meant, broke upon her, and she cried aloud in a voice sharp with misery—
“They will be engaged; they will be married; and I shall have to stay at home and look on! I shall have to take part, and pretend that I don’t care. Oh, I can’t—I can’t do it! If it had been some one at a distance, some one I need never have seen, I could have borne it; but my own sister, living in the same house together all day long—that is too bitter! I’d rather die than face it!”
“Then I’ll die too!” cried Nan hotly. “Whether Ned cares for you or not, you are all the world to me. You don’t know how I love you, Maud! It would have broken my heart if you had married and gone away, and I never want to marry myself, if you and I can live together. No man could make up for you. I hate them all! Wretches! Nothing but misery wherever they come. I’ll never fall in love, and you’ll get over this in a few months, and we will look forward to having our own little house, and growing old together,—won’t we, darling?”
“Yes, we will,” assented Maud meekly. She looked at her sister and tried hard to smile; but the prospect seemed so dull—oh, so heart-breakingly dull!—after the rosy dreams of the past, that what was meant as comfort proved, after all, the last strain which was to break down her composure.
She threw up her hands to her face, and rocked to and fro in an abandonment of distress.
“Oh—oh, the days, and weeks, and months! They will be so long; I can’t realise it yet, but I know how I shall suffer. Oh, Nan, isn’t it hard, after being so happy—after feeling so sure? I never had a doubt all these years except just this last week, and then I thought it was my own foolish imagining;—and now to have it end like this! I can’t believe it! Are you sure, are you quite sure? It seems like a hideous mistake!”
Nan shook her head, and her face hardened.
“There’s no mistake on my part, but there’s one on his, and a big one too. He’ll find it out, that’s one comfort! He’ll suffer for it! If he thinks Lilias is going to be the sort of wife he needs, he’ll find out his mistake. He thinks himself well off because he has a few hundreds a year, and is as proud as a king because he has a house of his own in a dull little country town. Lilias’s ideas of poverty and his of wealth will come to much the same thing. She hates the country, and flies off to town at the least excuse. Ned is quiet and book-wormy; and she wants some one who is fond of life, and likes gadding about. They don’t suit each other in any one way that I can see, and before a year is over they will have found it out for themselves. Then he will be sorry!”
Maud cut her short with uplifted hand.
“Don’t, Nan; you make it worse! You mean to be kind, but it doesn’t comfort me to think that he will be disappointed. I love him, you see; and I can’t change in a moment because I discover that he doesn’t care for me. I want him to be happy. It would make me more miserable than ever if I thought it was a mistake. You are too hard on Lilias. She is very sweet and amiable, and if she really loves him she will not mind little things like that. We never spoke about him together, she and I, and she has only done what I did myself. No one is to blame—no one! It was my own foolish mistake, and I must bear the consequences.”