And this was true. Six months ago, if Frances had been asked what was the darling wish of her heart, her reply would have been to see one of her sisters, Betty especially, well and safely married.
But, as things were, would Betty respond to him? It almost seemed impossible. Or perhaps the entire dislocation of the positions of all involved made it as yet seem so to her.
“I am to exert myself doubly,” she went on thinking. “It is a case in which non-interference on my part would be a crime. I have so much to make amends for in this horrible, miserable mistake of mine. I must not allow the slightest trace of depression or agitation to appear. And, oh! how unutterably grateful I should be and am that the blow has fallen in this way, by a letter instead of—in any other way; all my thought, all my care now must be for my dear little Betty.”
She rose to her feet, composed and even strengthened, and as her thoughts concentrated themselves more and more on her sister, new and strange suggestions took shape respecting her.
Had Betty been quite like herself of late? Was she not looking less well, less restful than was usual with her? She had been, for her, abnormally energetic, it was true, but all the same, on looking back, Frances began to see that there had been a curious self-repression about the girl. She had certainly avoided any talk about herself; the old, almost childish habit with which she had often been laughingly charged, of “saying out whatever came into her head,” had deserted her. Yes, she had grown strangely reticent.
Was it possible, Frances asked herself, that in her own self-absorption she had been blinded to the true state of affairs with Betty? Was it possible that the child had already learnt to care for Horace? That, anxious as he had been to do nothing to gain her affections till he was justified in doing so, he had unconsciously betrayed himself?
“If it is so,” thought Frances, “I should have still more to be thankful for. For in my determination to forget myself there might be a real danger of my influencing her too much in his favour. And yet the suggestion must in some way be made; perhaps—we shall see—Eira may be brought to help in it. I must at least find this out, for I very much fear that poor Eira, as well as dear Betty herself, has been deceived by her affection for me into imagining what—oh! how could I ever have thought it?”
And again there came the sharp stab of mortification, which indeed it would take time and resolution entirely to overcome.
The consciousness, however, of how much she might have to undo as well as to do brought vigour with it. She walked on with a firm step, a step that had something of hardness in it, hardness directed solely against herself and the weakness which she was so resolutely determined to overcome.
It was, as has been said, a lovely day, an exquisite spring day, and for this, too, Frances felt a strange new sense of gratitude. A lark rose over her head with its never-to-be-mistaken song of jubilance, all but disappearing, as she gazed after it, into a scarcely discernible speck in the blue.