From which speech it will be perceived that Georgina Stondon was not a particularly different individual from Georgina Hurlford, but rather that she was capable of planning and scheming a little still.
Late in the season Phemie returned to Roundwood; but she had not been long settled there before a letter arrived from Marshlands entreating her not to forget her promise, but to come as soon as ever she could, and bring her uncle with her.
His part of the performance Mr. Aggland emphatically declined, and he could not quite resist saying to his niece—
“Phemie, do you think it is right for you to go? Are you safe—are you strong—are you not mad, think you, to fling yourself into such peril again?”
They were standing in the drawing-room at Roundwood as he spoke thus, he on one side of the centre table, she on the other; and the light of the wax candles fell full on her face as she remained for a moment silent ere she answered—
“I am safe—I am strong—and I am not mad—and I place myself in no peril. I am speaking the truth,” she added, with a smile. “I have no feeling now for Basil Stondon except that of friendship and pity. Seeing him as he is—not as I fancied him, but as he actually is—has done more towards curing me than all my punishment—than all my resolution.”
And she put her hand in his, and he felt that it did not tremble—that every finger lay passive—that every nerve seemed still.
“A woman’s mind is one of the inscrutable mysteries of this earth to me,” decided Mr. Aggland, as he thought over the puzzle of Phemie’s conduct in his own apartment. “I reared that woman—I watched her in childhood, girlhood—and best part of her womanhood I have spent by her side—and yet I know no more about her than if she were the greatest stranger upon earth. Well, she seems resolved to put herself in danger, but it is not my fault. Now, heaven and earth,” finished the perplexed philosopher, “is it?”
Down to Disley, Phemie travelled—over the old familiar ground the train swept on; and she took off her bonnet, and, drawing the blue curtain so as to shade her eyes from the glare of the light, looked out across the country just as she had done that day when she returned to Norfolk after her long sojourn abroad.
The fields were the same—the stations—the towns—the hedgerows—the poplars. Everything seemed unchanged excepting herself.