“Do not say that,” interrupted Mrs. Dudley.
“But I will say it,” she persisted, passionately. “You shall not think better of me than I deserve. You shall not imagine I am a girl like your girls—that I am a woman such as you are. Sometimes, sitting on the grass quietly by myself, I think about myself. Of course it is folly; but I do it, and wonder what I should have been like had my lot been cast at Berrie Down. I have seen nothing in my life but planning and scheming and shamming—nothing till I came here. Amongst you all, I dream of a different life to any I have ever known. I feel like a fallen angel on a short visit to Paradise. How you look at me! How stupid it is to talk about oneself! Shall we go in?”
“One moment,” Heather said. She had a clear, sweet voice, in which there was a great virtue of leisure. It was the voice of a woman whose life had not been hurried by anxiety, by passion, by excitement, or by over-work. It was one the melody of which never seemed out of time, never taken too fast. “One moment. Are you really unhappy, Bessie? Is there anything I could do, to——”
“To help me, you mean,” broke in the other, rapidly. “No one can do that. Am I unhappy? What cause have I for unhappiness? Am I not engaged—almost settled?”
“But do you love Gilbert?” asked Mrs. Dudley.
“Love him! Yes, I do, as well as married people usually love—perhaps better,” answered Bessie, and she laughed and dropped the bonbons; and then Lally and she picked them up out of the grass, and while she kept her face bent down, Bessie was thinking she could tell Mrs. Dudley one or two things which it might not have been pleasant for that lady to hear.
“Lally and I are great friends,” she said, irrelevantly. “I have put her to bed every night since you went away, and sang her to sleep afterwards. She is the only person who ever encored my music. Don’t you love ‘Ritornella,’ Lally? Don’t you delight in ‘Her dark hair hung loothe?’”
“Iss,” said Lally, readily.
“Agnes adopted Leonard in your absence, and has been really quite affecting in her maternal solicitude about that young gentleman; but Lally and I agreed nobody could comb out her hair so well as I—nobody tell her one-half so many fairy tales. I fear we have not kept such good hours as we ought; but she looks none the worse for it, does she?”
And Bessie, taking up the child, turned the little freckled face towards the light, and putting her hand under Lally’s chin, waited for the mother’s opinion on the appearance of her first-born.