“Old Mrs. What’s-her-name—what is her name, I always forget it?—the housekeeper, I mean, was full of a marriage that was to be in the family shortly. That is to say not in the family exactly but a near connection, Sir Ralph Severn, Lord Brackley’s step nephew. By-the-by, I dare say you know him, Geoffrey? He used to come here sometimes several years ago, before the Abbey was shut up. We were in the schoolroom, but I remember seeing him. It was long before he got the title.”
“I never met him,” said Mr. Baldwin. “Whom is he going to marry?”
“A sort of cousin of his own,” replied Georgie, “a Miss Vyse. A very beautiful girl, Mrs. Hutton—that’s her name—said. The old body made quite a romance out of it. This girl’s father, it appears, was in old days the lover of the present Lady Severn. But she was not allowed to marry him as she was an heiress. She used to be here a good deal with her step-brother when she was a girl, that is how Mrs. Hutton knows all about her. It sounds quite like a story-book, does it not? The children of the two poor things marrying, all these years after.”
“Very romantic, indeed,” said Geoffrey. “Particularly as the lady is beautiful.”
“Exceedingly beautiful,” said Miss Copley. “She has been living with Lady Severn for some time, for she has no home of her own. Every one has been surprised at the marriage not being announced sooner, Mrs. Hutton said. She had only just heard of it in some round-about way, and she was quite full of it.”
Then they talked about other things, and did not observe Marion’s increased silence, which lasted till they said goodbye to her at the door of the Cross House. A few days previously, when she had said to Geoffrey decisively that “all that sort of thing” was done with for her, “altogether and entirely,” she had meant what she said and believed her own assertion.
Now, when she hurried upstairs to her own bedroom in the dingy Mallingford House, and sat down on the hard floor in her muddy riding-habit, with but one wish in her mind—to be alone, out of the reach of curious, unsympathetic eyes—Now, I say, when at last she felt free to think over, to realize what she had heard, she knew that it was not true what she had said. Far from being “done with for her,” on the secret, unacknowledged hope that for her a happy day was yet to dawn when all the mystery would be explained, all the suffering more than compensated for by the blessedness of the present—on this hope she had in truth been living, through all these weary months. And now that it was rudely thus snatched away, that all was indeed for ever, over, what was there left for her to do, poor weary, heartbroken wanderer in a very strange and desolate land—but to lie down and die?
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