“They are both so good,” said Alys to herself, as she lay, far from sleeping, alas! poor girl, on Mrs Wills’s best bed. “Laurence, of course, I do believe to be the noblest man in the world, except for his prejudices, and Mary, I can feel, is as good as gold. Why should they dislike each other so? For, though she tries to hide it from me, I can see that she dislikes him quite as much as he does her. And I am almost sure it was she whom I saw the other day coming down our avenue and crying. What can it all be? There is something I don’t know about— at I’m sure of.”
Then her thoughts took another flight.
“I wish Laurence would marry,” she said to herself. “I wish he would marry just such a girl as Mary Western. How nice it would be for me! Or—supposing I don’t get better from this accident—supposing I get worse and die—how dreadfully lonely Laurence will be! Poor Laurence—” and Alys’s eyes filled with tears at the very thought.
In the mean time Mr Cheviott was unpacking the basket, and handily enough, as Mary, watching him with some curiosity, was forced to allow. All sorts of good things made their appearance—a cold ham, two chickens, a packet of tea, fine bread, wine, etc, etc. Mr Cheviott looked about him in perplexity.
“Are there no dishes of any kind to be had, I wonder?” he said, at last. “I don’t like to disturb Mrs Wills—she is giving her husband his supper in the back kitchen, I see. Poor people, we have put them about quite enough already.”
Mary could no longer stand aloof. She had felt half inclined to be nettled by Mr Cheviott’s calm manner of ignoring what she could not but own to herself had been, in its inference at least, a rude speech.
“He still feels he is under an obligation to me,” she had said to herself, hotly, “and therefore he won’t resent anything I say. I don’t agree with Lilias. I would much prefer his being uncivil, to civility of that patronising ‘I couldn’t-do-otherwise’ kind.” But the quiet good-nature with which he now turned to her for assistance appealed to something in Mary which could not but respond; the mixture of comicality too in the whole position was not without its attraction for her.
“You are not accustomed to kitchen arrangements,” she said, smiling a little; “there are the dishes—lots of real willow pattern, ‘all in a row’—just above your head. Stay, don’t you see? I can reach them.”
She stepped forward, put her foot lightly on a three-legged stool standing just under the shelf of dishes. But three-legged stools are cantankerous articles—they require to be treated with a certain consideration mysterious to the uninitiated. Mary, perhaps for the first time in her life, suffering from some amount of self-consciousness, gave no thought to the three-leggedness of the stool, and, light as was her spring upon it, it proved too much for its equilibrium; the stool tilted forward, and Mary would have fallen ignominiously—perhaps worse than ignominiously, for the kitchen floor was tiled with hard bricks—to the ground, had not Mr Cheviott darted forward just in time to catch her. Mary was exceedingly, ridiculously annoyed—she flushed scarlet, but before she had time to do more than spring back from Mr Cheviott’s supporting arms, he said with a smile, in which, notwithstanding her mortification, Mary could not detect any approach to a sneer:
“You are not accustomed to three-legged stools, it is very evident, Miss Western. Thank you all the same for your kind intentions, however. I think I can reach the dishes—”