'Captain Marsworth, my brother, Sir William Farrell, will be requiring my services at tea!'
Marsworth moved aside and she forward. But as she neared him, he caught her passionately in his arms and kissed her. She released herself, crimson.
'Do I like being kissed?' she said in a low voice—'do I? Anyway don't do it again!—and if you dare to say a word yet—to anyone—'
Her eyes threatened; but he saw in them revelations her pride could not check, and would have disobeyed her at once; but she was too quick for him. In a second she had opened the door and was gone.
During the rest of the afternoon, her brother and Nelly watched Cicely's proceedings with stupefaction; only equalled by the bewilderment of Miss Daisy Stewart. For that young lady was promoted to the good graces of Sir William's formidable sister with a rapidity and completeness which only natural good manners and good sense could have enabled her to deal with; considering the icy exclusion to which she had been so long condemned. But as she possessed both, she took it very simply; always with the same serene light in her grey eyes.
Marsworth said to himself presently that young Fellows' chances were good. But in truth he hardly remembered anything about them, except that by the help of them he had kissed Cicely! And he had yet to find out what that remarkable fact was to mean, either to himself or to her. She refused to let him take her back to the farm, and she only gave him a finger in farewell. Nor did she say a word of what had happened, even to Nelly.
Nelly spent again a very wakeful night. Farrell had walked home with them, and she understood from him that, although he was going over early to Carton the following morning, he would be at the cottage again before many days were over. It seemed to her that in telling her so he had looked at her with eyes that seemed to implore her to trust him. And she, on hearing it, had been merely dumb and irresponsive, not forbidding or repellent, as she ought to have been. The courage to wound him to the quick—to leave him bereft, to go out into the desert herself, seemed to be more and more oozing away from her.
Yet there beside her bed, on the table which held her Testament, and the few books—almost all given her by W.F.—to which she was wont to turn in her wakeful hours, was George's photograph in uniform. About three o'clock in the morning she lit her candle, and lay looking at it, till suddenly she stretched out her hand for it, kissed it repeatedly, and putting it on her breast, clasped her hands over it, and so fell asleep.
But before she fell asleep, she was puzzled by the sounds in Bridget's room next door. Bridget seemed to be walking about—pacing up and down incessantly. Sometimes the steps would cease; only to begin again after a while with the same monotony. What could be the matter with Bridget? This vague worry about her sister entered into and heightened all Nelly's other troubles. Yet all the same, in the end, she fell asleep; and the westerly wind blowing over Wetherlam, and chasing wild flocks of grey rain-clouds before him, found no one awake in the cottage or the farm to listen to the concert he was making with the fells, but Bridget—and Cicely.
* * * * *