“Yes,” she thought, “Blanche was right, and Herty was right. She is lovely.”
“I do hope so,” she replied eagerly, as they separated. Lady Hebe walked on, thinking. For she thought a good deal.
“Poor little thing,” she said to herself, “it must be very dull. Yet they have each other, and their mother: the only things that have ever been wanting to me, they have! But still, the strangeness and the loneliness, and the not having any clear place of their own. I wonder they cared to settle in England; I wonder if there is nothing I can do for them.”
She had reached the lodge gates by this time. A little further down the road—scarcely more than a lane—was a stile, on the other side of which lay the field path, which was the short cut to Crossburn.
And leaning by the stile was a figure, which, at the first glimpse of Hebe emerging from the Alderwood grounds, started forward, hastening across with eager gladness; young, manly, full of life and brightness, he seemed almost a second Hebe, in masculine form.
“Norman,” she exclaimed, “I haven’t kept you long waiting, have I?”
“I enjoyed it, dear: not very long. I liked to watch for the first gleam of you,” he said simply.
And together, in the long rays of the soft evening sunshine, the two young creatures made their way across the fields.
“What have I done,” said Hebe Shetland to herself—“what have I done to be so very, very happy?”