He would appear some time in the morning, she supposed. With an expression half rueful, half amused, she fell to imagining his interview with Catherine, with her mother. Poor Catherine! Rose feels herself happy enough to allow herself a good honest pang of remorse for much of her behaviour to Catherine this winter; how thorny she has been, how unkind often, to this sad changed sister. And now this will be a fresh blow! 'But afterwards, when she has got over it,—when she knows that it makes me happy,—that nothing else would make me happy,—then she will be reconciled, and she and I perhaps will make friends, all over again, from the beginning. I won't be angry or hard over it—poor Cathie!'
And with regard to Mr. Flaxman. As she stands there waiting idly for what destiny may send her, she puts herself through a little light catechism about this other friend of hers. He had behaved somewhat oddly towards her of late; she begins now to remember that her exit from Lady Charlotte's house the night before had been a very different matter from the royally attended leave-takings, presided over by Mr. Flaxman, which generally befell her there. Had he understood? With a little toss of her head she said to herself that she did not care if it was so. 'I have never encouraged Mr. Flaxman to think I was going to marry him.'
But of course Mr. Flaxman will consider she has done badly for herself. So will Lady Charlotte and all her outer world. They will say she is dismally throwing herself away, and her mother, no doubt influenced by the clamour, will take up very much the same line.
What matter! The girl's spirit seemed to rise against all the world. There was a sort of romantic exaltation in her sacrifice of herself, a jubilant looking forward to remonstrance, a wilful determination to overcome it. That she was about to do the last thing she could have been expected to do, gave her pleasure. Almost all artistic faculty goes with a love of surprise and caprice in life. Rose had her full share of the artistic love for the impossible and the difficult.
Besides—success! To make a man hope and love, and live again—that shall be her success. She leaned against the window, her eyes filling, her heart very soft.
Suddenly she saw a commissionaire coming up the little flagged passage to the door. He gave in a note, and immediately afterwards the dining-room door opened.
'A letter for you, Miss,' said the maid.
Rose took it—glanced at the handwriting. A bright flush—a surreptitious glance at Catherine who sat absorbed in a wandering letter from Mrs. Darcy. Then the girl carried her prize to the window and opened it.
Catherine read on, gathering up the Murewell names and details as some famished gleaner might gather up the scattered ears on a plundered field. At last something in the silence of the room, and of the other inmate in it, struck her.