“It must be a trial to the two sisters, especially to Miss Laurence, poor girl, to think of being parted, even though Mrs Frank Thurston, that is to be, will only be a few streets off,” observed one kindly-hearted Wareborough matron to Mrs Dalrymple during a morning call when the Laurence family happened to come on the tapis; to which Mrs Dalrymple, who was feeling anything but happy about Eugenia’s altered looks, agreed with almost suspicious eagerness. For Mr Dalrymple, with true masculine magnanimity, had already given symptoms of having a stock of “I told you sos” in readiness for the first suitable opportunity, and had Eugenia been less preoccupied, her friend’s increasingly demonstrative affection and constant reiteration of “how very well she was looking,” could not but have roused the girl’s own suspicions.
Curiously enough, in these days Eugenia seemed to turn with satisfaction to Gerald Thurston.
“How very much Gerald has improved again of late,” she remarked one day naïvely to Sydney. “For some time after he came home, I thought India had spoilt him. He seemed rough and careless, as if he had got out of the way of women’s society, and was turning into a moody old bachelor. But now he has got back his nice, gentle, understanding way. He seems to know by instinct when, when—” she stopped and hesitated—“when Frank and his chattering are almost more than I can bear,” had been in her thoughts, but she recollected herself in time to change it—“when one is tired and disinclined to talk or anything,” she said, wearily, and Sydney had hard work to force back the expression of sympathy which she felt would not at this stage be welcome.
“Yes,” she answered simply, “Gerald is very good and kind.”
She would not have been the least offended had Eugenia finished her sentence as had been on her tongue. How she pitied her no words could have told, and many a time Frank’s unconscious cheerfulness jarred even on Sydney herself, poor child, feeling almost as if the contrast of her own happy content was a crime against Eugenia’s shattered hopes.
She pitied Gerald too. It was worse for him now, she said to herself, than if all had been as she had expected. True, he might then have realised more acutely the sharpness of his disappointment, have suffered unselfishly from his misgivings as to the worthiness of her choice; “but still,” thought Sydney, in her sensible way, “it would have been over and certain—a thing that was to be, and he would have been beginning to get accustomed to it.”
But now though Eugenia in the body was still among them, the heart and soul—the very life it seemed just now, had gone out of her. All the freshness and brightness had been sacrificed—whatever possibilities the far-off future might yet conceal, the Eugenia of Gerald’s first love, the Eugenia of his absent dreams, was gone for ever, could never be his. She had never been his, it was true, but Sydney’s womanish faith in the “what would have been,” was indefensibly great. Correspondingly deep was her unspoken disappointment, her vehement, almost fierce indignation against the cause of all this trouble, the wanton destroyer of her sister’s youth and happiness. Had she come upon the subject with Frank, he would, she knew, have either refused to believe in Eugenia’s suffering, or have blamed her as herself the originator of it.
“But he doesn’t understand her, and that man threw dust in his eyes. Supposing even that Eugenia was easily deceived, allowing her to be, as Frank says, impressionable and extreme, does that excuse him; cold-hearted, unprincipled, selfish man of the world that he must be, to have robbed my darling of her happiness.”
But all these feelings, little suspected under her quiet exterior, Sydney kept to herself.
Late one afternoon, about six weeks after Captain Chancellor had left Wareborough, the sisters on their way home from a long and rather fatiguing shopping expedition, happened to pass Barnwood Terrace.