“Are you sorry?”
“Sorry for your sister? Yes—intensely sorry!”
“You think I am hard—unsympathetic?”
“I think you are hardly in a fit state to understand your own feelings to-day. It has been a great strain, and you have kept up bravely and well.”
Hilary’s lip trembled, and she covered her face with her hands. “Oh, I don’t want to be hard, but it does seem so dreadful! She had a whole month to think over it—and then to bring all this misery upon him at the last moment. I feel ashamed! Surely, surely, it is easy to know whether one cares or not. If I were engaged—”
“Yes?”
“Oh, I don’t know—I should never, never promise to marry anyone unless I loved him with my whole heart; but when I did, I’d stick to him if the whole world were against us.”
“I believe you would.” Mr Rayner hesitated at the end of these words as if he were about to say something further, but the hesitation ended in silence, and presently Hilary leapt to her feet and began to pace up and down.
“Oh, let us walk about. I can’t sit still. I am too nervous. If we go along this path we shall not meet anybody, and it will pass the time. I can’t bear to think of what is going on inside the house.” So for the next hour they walked up and down trying in vain to talk upon outside topics, and coming back again and again to the same painful theme. At last the sound of wheels came to their ears again. The fly could be seen wending its way down the country lane, and Hilary lost no time in running home to rejoin her father in his study.
He was standing with his arms resting upon the mantelpiece, his head buried in his hands, and when he turned to meet her, it struck the girl with a stab of pain that for the first time he looked old—an old man, tired and worn with the battle of life.