“Oh, dear,” said Despard. “Very well, Maddie. I must, I suppose.”
“Then be ready at a quarter to four. I’ll drive you in the pony-carriage,” and Madeline disappeared through the glass door whence she had emerged.
“I wonder if she will write to-day,” thought Mr Norreys, though he would have been ashamed to ask it. “I should like to know it’s done—a sort of crossing the Rubicon. And it’s a good while now since that last day I saw her. She was never quite so sweet as that day. Supposing I heard she was married?”
His heart seemed to stop beating at the thought, and he grew white, though there was no one to see. But he reassured himself. Few things were less likely. Portionless girls, however charming, don’t marry so quickly nowadays.
Madeline’s feelings were mingled. She was honestly and unselfishly glad of what she believed might be a real turning point towards good for Despard. Yet—“if only he had not chosen a girl quite so denuded of worldly advantages as she evidently is,” she reflected. “For of course if she had either money or connection Mrs Englewood would not have kept it a secret. She is far too outspoken. I must beg her to tell everything she knows, not to be afraid of my mixing her name up in the matter in any way. When she sees that Charles and I do not disapprove she will feel less responsibility.”
And it was with a comfortable sense of her own and “Charles’s” unworldliness that Mrs Selby prepared to indite the important letter.
She saw little of her brother till the afternoon. He did not appear at luncheon, having left word that he had gone for a long walk.
“Provided only that he is not too late for the Densters’,” thought Madeline, with a little sigh over the perversity of mankind.
But her fears were unfounded. At ten minutes to four Mr Norreys made his appearance in the hall, faultlessly attired, apologising with his usual courtesy, in which to his sister he never failed, for his five minutes’ delay, and Mrs Selby, feeling pleased with herself outwardly and inwardly, for she was conscious both of looking well in a very pretty new bonnet, and of acting a truly high-minded part as a sister, seated herself in her place, with a glance of satisfaction at her companion.
“Everybody will be envying me,” she said to herself, with a tiny sigh as she remembered former air-castles in Despard’s behoof. “The Flores-Carter girls and Edith and Bertha Byder, indeed all the neighbourhood get quite excited if they know he’s here. He might have had his choice of the best matches in this county, to my own knowledge, and there are several girls with money. Ah, well!”