“Rage is hardly the word, Nan. I am very, very miserable. You don’t understand, and I am not at liberty to explain the reason. I am in trouble—horrible trouble!”
“Humph!” quoth Nan sceptically. “Doesn’t seem to have a chastening effect upon you. It affects us all differently, I suppose. I should have said you were in a savage rage, if you’d asked me!”
“But I didn’t ask you, you see, and it is very wrong of you to judge. If I could tell you the truth, you would realise your mistake, but I must keep my own counsel.”
“Of course, of course! Don’t tell me, I beseech you; I can’t keep a secret if I’m paid for it,” said Nan calmly, and with an absence of curiosity altogether maddening to the listener. There was nothing Lilias wanted more than to be coaxed to tell her trouble and pose as a suffering martyr, for her sister’s benefit. She flounced out of the room in high dudgeon, and Nan stopped her work and looked after her with thoughtful eyes.
“This is the beginning,” she said tragically to herself—“the beginning of the end!”
Chapter Eighteen.
Ned in Trouble.
When Ned Talbot arrived a fortnight later, his face showed that his anxiety had been no imaginary thing. He looked, indeed, so worn and aged, that his friends were shocked to see him, and tears of commiseration rose in Lilias’s pretty eyes. The consciousness that Ned looked to her for consolation roused a natural womanly tenderness in her heart, and nothing could have been sweeter than her behaviour on the day of his arrival. As for Ned himself, fresh from the grim northern town, with the everlasting clang of machinery sounding in his ears, it seemed a very foretaste of paradise to find himself in the fragrant southern garden, seated beneath the shade of the trees, with Lilias’s lovely face smiling upon him. He told her as much in lover-like fashion, and she protested modestly, and smiled more angelically than ever for the rest of the evening, in order to live up to her reputation.