“Very well,” replied her mother. “I should not recognize you, Cicely, if you were to become prejudiced or suspicious. You will go out a little now, won’t you? You have not been out to-day, and Trevor will not be here just yet.”
“Yes, I will go out now,” said Cicely. “Kiss me, mother, and don’t say I am mean and suspicious. I am cross, I think. Kiss me, dear mother.”
She left her mother with a bright face and stood on the lawn by the sun-dial, kissing her hand merrily in farewell as the carriage drove away. But when it was quite out of sight, in spite of her resolutions, her face clouded over again and her heart grew heavy.
“I ought to be glad that mother is so fond of Geneviève,” she thought. “She will miss me the less.”
Then she felt ashamed of her own bitterness.
“I don’t know what is coming over me,” she reflected. “I am mean and unamiable. Can anything be meaner than for me to be jealous of Geneviève, I who have so much, and she so little! Yet I am—I am angry because both Trevor and mother have scolded me for being cold to her. I am spoilt; I can’t bear being scolded—and I am vexed with her because she has the power of showing her affection and enlisting sympathy, whereas I seem to grow colder the more I feel. And as for sympathy, I seem to repel it now—nobody thoroughly sympathises with me.”
She sat down on the stone at the foot of the sun-dial in a very unusual mood of self pity—Cicely, whom at this very moment Geneviève was thinking of as the very happiest girl in all the world! So little do we know of the fit of each other’s garments.
From where she was sitting, Cicely could see the drive almost all the way to the lodge. And in the light dress she wore, she herself was easily to be distinguished, by quick eyes at least, belonging to any one approaching, the Abbey by this front road. There came a sound of wheels. It was too early for Mr. Fawcett, besides which it was more than probable that he would be riding.
“Some people coming to call,” thought Cicely, groaning in the spirit. She felt peculiarly disinclined to-day for small talk and lady-like gossip, and wished she had not placed herself where ignorance of the arrival was impossible. But when the carriage came fairly within view, her fears proved to have been ill-founded. It was only the Greybridge fly. Almost before Cicely had time to wonder who could be its occupant, the carriage stopped and a gentleman got out. He had evidently seen her; he came quickly across the lawn in her direction. Cicely got up from her seat and went forward to meet him.
“Mr. Guildford!” she exclaimed. “I had no idea it was you.”