Miss Lermont laughed.
“Ah, well,” she said. “If the time ever comes when your hesitation vanishes, promise to let me know at once.”
Philippa was to leave Dorriford the next day. That morning brought her a letter from her brother Charley.
“I am only writing,” he said, “to make sure of your keeping to your train. I am going up to town for a night, and will meet you at the junction to-morrow on my way home again. And, by-the-by, I am half thinking of asking a friend to stay two or three days with us. I had not time to tell you about him before you left home,”—for Charley Raynsworth had only returned from the East a day or two before Philippa’s visit to the Lermonts—“we had so much to talk about. He is a civil engineer whom I saw a good deal of in India, and he came home a few weeks ago for good. His name is Gresham—he says he met you at Merle once. Do you remember him? I am sure my father and all of you will like him.”
Philippa’s breath came quick and short for a moment on reading these words.
“How strange,” she thought, “that Charley and he should have been thrown together! ‘Met me at Merle’—yes, indeed—that day! Once I see him I daresay it will seem all right. But just at present I feel almost more self-conscious about our last meeting than about the time at Wyverston. I wonder,” she added to herself, “if dear Solomon has been in India too!”
There was still a little flush of excitement on her face when she ran up-stairs to say good-bye to her cousin Maida, whose slowly increasing weakness was steadily but surely diminishing the hours which she was each day able to spend down-stairs.
“How well you are looking this morning, dear! Are you so delighted to go home, and not the least bit sorry to leave us?” she said, with half-playful reproach.
“Of course I am sorry to leave you, dear, dear Maida,” said Philippa, tenderly. “I am feeling very pleased though, this morning, for I have just heard that Charley will meet me at the junction, and I don’t think I had fully realised how nice it is to have him back again,” she added in explanation, which was strictly true so far as it went. And indeed in her anticipation of meeting Michael Gresham again, she could scarcely have described her sensations as pleasurable or the reverse.