“There now,” she said, lightly. “I must run home. I don’t think you will require a cicerone for this church, Mr Cheviott,” and before he could reply, she was gone. Gone—to try to smile when she thought her heart was breaking, to seem cheerful and merry when over and over again there rang through her brain the cruel words—“He never cared for me, he says himself it was an infatuation. He is ashamed to remember it; oh no, he never really cared for me, or else my own words turned his love into contempt and dislike—and what wonder!”
Two or three days after Lilias’s marriage Mary heard from Alys Cheviott. She and her brother were leaving England almost immediately, she said, for several months. The letter was kind and affectionate, but it did not even allude to the possibility of her seeing Mary before they left.
“Good-bye, Alys,” said Mary, as she folded it up and one or two hot tears fell in the envelope. “Good-bye, dear Alys; and good-bye to the prize I threw from me, when it might have been mine—surely the best chance of happiness that ever woman was offered!”
Chapter Thirty One.
A Farewell Visit to Romary.
“He desired in a wife an intellect that, if not equal to his own, could become so by sympathy—a union of high culture and noble aspiration, and yet of loving womanly sweetness which a man seldom finds out of books; and when he does find it perhaps it does not wear the sort of face that he fancies.”
The Parisians.
The Westerns were not to spend this winter at Marshover. It was too cold for Mr Western, and so was Hathercourt. A house, therefore, for the worst of the season had been taken at Bournemouth, and there old Mr Brooke had promised to spend with them his otherwise solitary Christmas.
“I’m so glad you are going to Bournemouth,” said Mrs Greville one day, a few weeks after Lilias’s marriage, when she had driven over to say good-bye to her old friends before they left; “it is such a nice cheerful place, and plenty going on there. Quite a pleasant little society. It will be an advantage for the girls if, as Mrs Brabazon tells me, they are to be in town next year.”