“And if,” thought Philippa, “he thinks it his duty—officious people always think things their duty—to warn his cousins that we are acting a part and deceiving others, who knows what may come of it? Poor Evey will in one sense suffer more than I, and it will be all my doing! I may have ruined everything for them by my recklessness and self-will.”
She sat down beside the window in a state very nearly bordering on despair. She dared not let herself cry, though to one of her temperament the very rarity of her tears made them the greater relief.
“What can I do?” she repeated, and wild ideas chased each other through her brain as to the possibility of telegraphing to her mother to summon them home at once, or of an appeal, however repugnant to every feeling, to Michael Gresham to—nay, what could she say to him, without giving him her full confidence? and that, she scarcely felt that it would be possible to do. Of all men she had ever met, as far as she could judge, he seemed the last in any way likely to understand or to sympathise with the motives which had led her to act as she had done. Indeed, no man, she said to herself, could enter into all the feelings, some of them so apparently trivial and frivolous, which had actuated her.
“And a man like him least of all,” she thought. “One can see that he prides himself on excessive honesty and straightforwardness. No doubt he could be very good at saying disagreeable things from the best of motives, and he could be quite incapable of entering into shades of feeling, he is so rough. Now if it had been his cousin who was in question—oh, it would have been quite different! He must be so refined and delicate in perception.”
She gave a deep sigh. Her eyes turned mechanically to the window, and she gazed out half vacantly. The afternoon was very still, and the grey sky in any other part of the world would almost certainly have prognosticated rain. But Philippa was learning her bearings better by now in this northern country, where the greyness often meant nothing special as regarded the weather.
The wind had been high the night before, and the trees almost looked as if winter had already come, the paths being thickly strewn with their discarded vesture.
A little shiver passed through the girl.
“It does look dreary,” she thought, for her window overlooked some of the back premises, where no gardener’s broom had as yet tidied up the traces of the wind’s undoing. One corner of the great stable-yard was visible, and as Philippa still looked out, the silence was broken by a sound she loved to hear, the eager barking of a huge watch-dog, whom she had already made friends with in her rambles about the place.
“I hope they are going to loose him,” she thought, with interest, craning her neck to see what was happening.
Just at that moment she caught sight of Mrs Shepton’s slight and still erect figure, as she made her way back to the house, and a sudden suggestion flashed into the girl’s mind.