“The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death,” said Mr. Aggland, thoughtfully, as he lingeringly left the room.
CHAPTER VII.
OLD FRIENDS AND OLD PLACES.
Time went by, and still Phemie remained unmarried.
Suitors had come, and suitors had gone; but to each and all the widow’s answer was the same. She would never take a second husband. And so time went on, and she was still, as I have said, unmarried.
But the years had in other respects worked great changes in her. She was not the Phemie we have seen in the pages that have been written. She was outwardly a changed Phemie; a woman who, finding that neither work nor solitude availed to bring her peace, went in for distraction, and was to be met with at every concert, flower-show, pic-nic, what you will.
It was Duncan Aggland who had greatly contributed to bring about this alteration; Duncan, who, seeming to imagine he owned a kind of reversionary interest in his cousin, had wanted her to cast her fortunes with his, and when she declined to do so, remarked that she was staying single for the sake of Basil Stondon—that he knew she was, and that everybody said (oh! the horror of that everybody) no young woman would mew herself up at Roundwood as she did if she had not been disappointed by some one; and that further, he (the speaker) had not been so blind as perhaps she imagined to the state of affairs at Marshlands.
Mr. Duncan Aggland was very angry, or perhaps he would never have uttered such very disagreeable truths; and, like all people who are angry, he got the worst of the encounter, for Phemie thanked him for his engaging frankness, and begged that for the future he would not consider Roundwood so much his home as formerly.
“Because,” she finished, “I purpose taking a house in town, and I might see more of you then than would be at all agreeable if you continued to visit me as often as you have done.”
“But I am doing so well, Phemie,” he pleaded, becoming submissive in a moment. “I am to be taken into partnership next year, and——”
“No one can be more delighted to hear of your worldly advancement than I,” broke in Phemie. “I am charmed to know you are doing so well, and I have not the least doubt of your ability to maintain a wife; but on principle I object to the marriage of cousins, and whomsoever I may choose hereafter to marry, be quite sure it will not be you.”