“Out,” exclaimed Mr. Fawcett impatiently. “Where has she gone to? I thought she never went out in the morning. Or do you only mean,” he went on, his voice softening again, that she is in the garden?”
“No,” said Geneviève again, with a curious sort of timid reluctance in her manner, “no; I think not that she will be long of returning, above all, if she expected you; oh! no, surely, she will not be long, but she has gone to Notcotts to see some poor person that is ill, I think.”
“Gone to Notcotts!” repeated Mr. Fawcett. Then he gave vent to some angry exclamation, which Geneviève did not understand, and walked away to the window, muttering to himself. Some of the words reached the girl’s ear as she sat silently, growing rather frightened, at the piano.
“Gone to Notcotts!” he repeated again. “Yes, there or anywhere else rather than wait at home to see me. Father, mother, anything, anybody, before me. . . By George, what a fool I am!”
He was evidently very much put out, indeed. He had walked over to the Abbey early this morning on purpose to see Cicely, to “make friends” again by begging her to forgive him for his unkind words of the day before. He had been very unhappy in remembering them; never before had he parted from her in anger; never once before in all the years during which they had been childish friends, then boy and girl together, now promised husband and wife. And he could not bear the thought of having done so now. He was very ready to own himself to blame, though in his innermost heart he knew that the very subject of their disagreement, the point on which they differed, was only insisted on by him through his loyalty to Cicely, through his half-acknowledged consciousness that for the first time this loyalty was likely to be tested. Temptation, for the first time in his easy prosperous life, had drawn near him—might, he felt, draw nearer yet. He wished, he longed to resist it, to be true to himself, to Cicely, to what he knew was his best chance in life, what had been, what would be yet more and more, in very truth, “the making of him.” And full of these feelings he had hurried over to Greystone to find—what? Cicely, whom he had been picturing to himself as to the full as unhappy as he, absent—away calmly and comfortably to play the Lady Bountiful in a dirty village with which she had nothing whatever to do—and—Temptation, seated at Cicely’s piano, learning the music he loved, glancing up in his face with sweetest smiles and eyes yet glistening with tears, called forth, he strongly suspected, by his folly.
A pleasant and promising state of things. Being a man, he did what in such circumstances most men would do. He blamed everybody but himself; he swore at everything under his breath, he worked himself up into a passion; but he did not leave the library again by the glass door, still standing ajar—the unlucky glass door, but for which he would have gone round to the front entrance, and there made decorous inquiry for Cicely, or failing her, for her mother; he did not say good-bye to pretty Temptation, sitting there, gazing at him with childish alarm and concern in her great lovely eyes.
She was really frightened. Passions and naughty tempers were tabooed in the peaceful dwelling of Monsieur le Pasteur Casalis, as were worldly tastes and frivolities of all kinds. Only the latter class of unholy visitors, being more easy of concealment, had found their way into one youthful heart in that orthodox household, and made themselves very much at home there. But Geneviève had very rarely seen any one in a passion—her father, good man, never. And the sight of Trevor’s anger altogether overcame her. She sat still for another minute or two, then jumped up, ran across the room to where the young man was standing, his fair face dark with irritation and annoyance, laid her hand on his arm and whispered tremblingly, “Oh! do not be so angry. Oh! please not. She will come soon. I am so sorry; oh! so very sorry for you.”
He turned round quickly. For an instant she feared that his anger was turned upon her, and she trembled more visibly. Trevor’s face softened as he looked at her.
“Don’t look so frightened, child,” he said, not unkindly, but with some impatience. “I am only annoyed. There is nothing to be very, very sorry about.”
“Yes there is,” sobbed Geneviève. “I am sorry for you because I know all now. I know why you are chagrined—vexed, I mean—that Cicely is out. I understand all now.”