“It is not candid of you to try to turn the tables in that way,” said Evelyn, hotly. “You know perfectly why I am angry with you. You have behaved—you must have behaved in the most extraordinary way to Mr Gresham, after—encouraging him as you have done.”
Philippa bit her lips to keep back an indignant reply, “What has he said to you?” she asked, composedly. “Very little,” said Evelyn. “Very few men would have behaved as well as he has done. He only told me that you had insisted on going home alone, and that he was completely at a loss to understand you. Of course I knew what he meant—that you had refused him.” Then, with a sudden change of tone, “Is it too late, Philippa?” she added, almost in entreaty, “Can I do nothing to put things right?”
Her eagerness touched Philippa.
“Listen, Evey,” she said, almost solemnly, “and then never let us allude to this matter again. I cannot go into all the details of what passed between Mr Gresham and me. It would be no use. I doubt if any one, except perhaps mamma, would quite enter into what I feel. But I must just tell you this. I am as convinced as if I had thought it over for years that he and I are entirely, radically unsuited to each other, and so there is an end of it. Do believe that I absolutely mean what I say, and know what I mean.” Evelyn’s eyes filled with tears. Something in her sister’s manner carried conviction with it.
“Oh, Phil,” she said, “you are a far stronger character than I, I know, and I must, I suppose, give in to you; you must know best. But it does seem such a pity—such an awful pity! And what can have changed your opinion of him so suddenly?”
“Was it suddenly?” said Philippa, dreamily. “Some things seem to have nothing to do with time, and, after all, was it not,”—but here she stopped abruptly—“was it not,” finishing the sentence in her own mind, “lurking there already, the doubt of him? the suspicion of there not being any real sympathy between us?”
“Don’t misunderstand me, Evey!” she went on aloud. “I am terribly sorry to have been the cause of anything,”—she hesitated—“mortifying or disappointing to him, though I daresay it will not last long,” with a little smile. “I do him full justice, and I hope he will marry some one who will make him far happier than I could have done,” she ended, earnestly, and the complete absence of bitterness in her tone was more convincing to her sister than anything else could have been that her castle in the air was doomed to no tangible existence.
Of all those concerned in the little drama which had that day been enacted at Merle-in-the-Wold, perhaps the one the least painfully affected, full of sympathy though he had been for the girl whom he seemed fated to meet under such curious circumstances, was Michael Gresham.
Chapter Twenty Four.
Charley’s Friend.
Two years! A very short time to the old, but not so to the young, especially in anticipation. That autumn day when Philippa Raynsworth bade good-bye to her kind friends at Dorriford, she little expected that twice twelve months would pass before she returned there, and had this period been then alluded to, it would have seemed to her half a lifetime off.