They kissed each other, and Lilias went out again into the rain and the darkness. Mary came back again into the kitchen, wishing, “dreadfully,” as the children say, that she could have gone with her sister. She stood by the fire feeling dull and lonely, and, to tell the truth, though the Rectory was only a mile away, rather homesick! She was tired, too, which state of things has more to do with our moods of depression than we, in youth anyway, take into sufficient account.
“I must go back to Miss Cheviott,” she said to herself; “how I do hope the doctor will think her better to-morrow. I may as well see what Lily has brought. How kind poor mother is!”
She was turning to examine the bundle when the half-closed door was pushed open and Mr Cheviott came in.
“My sister seems to be falling asleep,” he said. “Perhaps it will be as well if we leave her for a little. I promised her you would go back in half an hour, and in the mean time—why, has your sister gone, and alone?”
“My brother was to meet her, thank you,” said Mary. “And you? Can you—are you really going to stay with Alys all night?”
“Yes,” replied Mary. “My sister is going to explain to my mother.”
“It is exceedingly kind of you,” said Mr Cheviott; “but really—I feel ashamed.”
“You need not feel so,” said Mary, quietly. “I have—well not often, perhaps, but certainly several times—done far more for the poor people about here, and would do so again at any moment for any one in trouble.”
Mr Cheviott was silent. Then his glance happening to fall on a basket standing unopened on a side table, he started and crossed the room to where it stood.
“I am forgetting,” he said; and then, taking a small knife out of his pocket, he proceeded to cut the strings which fastened it, and to lift out its contents. It had all been a pious fiction of Alys’s about fancying she would go to sleep better if left alone. She had been making herself unhappy about Mary’s having had nothing to eat all the evening, and a basket of provisions having been sent from Romary by Mrs Golding, she had begged her brother to do the honours of the farm-house by unpacking them for Miss Western’s benefit. She was full, too, of a secret wish that somehow or other a better understanding might be brought about between her brother and this girl, to whom from the first she had felt so strongly attracted.