“My dear, I thank you: you have made me very happy. You shall never have cause to repent it.”
“It is so strange,” she whispered, “that you should wait all these years, with the world to choose from, and then think of me at last! I can scarcely believe it.”
“Ay, I suppose it is strange. But I must tell you something, Anne. When quite a youth, only one-and-twenty, there was a young lady whom I dearly loved. She was poor, and not of much family, and my father forbade the union. She married some one else, and died. It is for the love of her I have kept single all these years. But I shall not make you the less good husband.”
“And I—I wish to tell you that I once cared for some one,” whispered Anne, in her straightforward honesty. “It is all over and done with; but I did like him very much.”
“Then, my dear, we shall be even,” he said, with a merry smile. “The one cannot reproach the other. And now—this is the beginning of April; before the month shall have closed you had better come to me. We have nothing to wait for; and I do not like, now that you belong to me, to leave you one moment longer than is needful with that lady whom you are forced to call stepmother.”
How Anne reached home that late afternoon she hardly knew: she knew still less how to bring the news out. In the course of the following morning she tried to do so, and made a bungle of it.
“Sir Robert not going to get you a situation as governess!” interrupted Julia, before Anne had half finished. “Of course he is not. He knows you are not capable of taking one. I thought how much he was intending to help you. You must have had plenty of cheek, Anne, to trouble him.”
“I am going to be his wife instead,” said poor Anne, meekly. “He has asked me to be. And—and it is to be very soon; and he is coming to see Mrs. Lewis this morning.”
Mrs. Lewis, sitting back in an easy-chair, her feet on the fender, dropped the book she was reading to stare at Anne. Julia burst into a laugh of incredulity. Her mother echoed it, and spoke——
“You poor infatuated girl! This comes of being brought up on French soup. But Sir Robert Tenby has no right to play jokes upon you. I shall write and tell him so.”