Benedick.—“Fair Beatrice, I thank you for your pains.”
Beatrice.—“I took no more pains for those thanks than you took pains to thank me.”
Much Ado about Nothing.
An hour or so later on this eventful afternoon—or evening, rather, it was fast growing dark—a cloaked and hooded figure was to be seen hastening along the lane which was the shortest way from Hathercourt Rectory to the Edge Farm. The figure had good need to be cloaked and hooded, in the waterproof sense of the term, and goloshed too, for the beautiful spring day had ended in, superficially speaking, very unbeautiful rain. It came pouring down—the footpath was a mass of mud already, and before long threatened to be indistinguishable from the road. Lilias—for it was she—had begun by picking her steps, but soon gave this up in despair. It was all she could do to get on at all, laden as she was with a rather cumbersome parcel under her cloak. But her step nevertheless was light and buoyant, and her face and eyes, had there been any one there to see them, or any light to see them by, would have told of eagerness and some excitement, instead of fatigue and depression, as, taking into consideration her seven miles’ walk to Withenden and back, and her present uncomfortable surroundings, might not unreasonably have been expected.
“It is horrible of me—I don’t understand myself,” she said, suddenly, aloud. Then she hurried on faster than before, pursuing, nevertheless, the same train of thought. “Why should I feel more buoyant and hopeful than I have done for long, just when such a terrible thing—or what may prove such a terrible thing—has happened to that poor girl? I know I am sorry for her—and even if I were not, I should be sorry to think how it will grieve Arthur; but yet—ah, yes, it is just the feeling of having, as it were, something to do with him again—of perhaps hearing him spoken of and of seeing the house where he was so lately. His own house?”
She had never been inside the farm-house. Often they had passed it in their walks with Arthur, and more than once he had tried to persuade the Rectory family to organise some sort of picnic party to his bachelor quarters; but to this Mrs Western had so decidedly objected that the project had never been fulfilled. So Lilias was rather in the dark, mentally as well as physically, as to the exact approach to the front door, if front door there was to a house whose three entrances were all much on a par, and in the end she hit upon the one which Mrs Wills decidedly considered the back door. It had the advantage, however, in the present state of the weather, of being near the kitchen, so her rap was answered without delay.
“My sister is still here, is she not? Miss Western—Miss Mary Western, I mean,” she explained, in reply to Mrs Wills’s mute look of bewildered inquiry.
“Oh, yes, miss, to be sure she is, and what we should have done without her I don’t know, and what we shall do now if she—”
She was interrupted.
“Shut that door, if you please, Mrs Wills,” a man’s voice called out, “it sets all the other doors in the house rattling,” and from an inner room Mr Cheviott came out to enforce his directions. He had almost shut the door in Lilias’s face before he perceived her. Then—“I beg your pardon,” he said instinctively, but, dim as the light was, Lilias felt certain he had recognised her.
“He will think he is going to have the whole Western family down upon him,” she thought, with a smile. Then she came forward a little.
“I am Miss Western,” she said, calmly, and something in the voice, a certain cheery yet half-defiant ring, reminded her hearer of Mary—he had never come into personal contact with Lilias before. “I have come for my sister—it was too stormy for my mother to come out, but she was getting uneasy, and my little sister could not quite explain. I hope Miss Cheviott is not seriously hurt?”