“I never said I disliked him,” said Betty. “But you know him far better than I do, and if—of course you know, Francie, if—if anybody liked you, or—or you liked anybody in a special sort of way, of course I should like such a person too!”
Frances drew a deep breath, and gathered herself together. It had come—the supreme moment, sooner than she had expected, and she must meet it bravely. It had come—to Betty too, and the little creature had risen, in her own way, with heroism. But this state of things as yet Frances scarcely realised.
“Betty, my dear child,” she began, “don’t get any mistaken ideas into your head about me—your second mother, as I always feel myself. I won’t pretend to misunderstand you, and I am glad you have spoken about it. No, no, don’t dream of anything of that sort about me, the time for it has passed. Why, I must be a year or two older than Horace! He and I are excellent friends, and I do believe he looks upon me almost as an elder sister. I should be glad,” here she spoke with hesitation that she did not attempt to conceal, “I should be glad to feel sure that as regards you yourself no shadow of the old prejudice about him remains. He deserves to be thoroughly liked and trusted.”
There was no answer from either of the other two, though Frances felt Eira’s eyes fixed on her in half-dazed amazement. She felt, too, that at Betty it was better not to glance! And after a moment or two she got up slowly, saying it must be near tea-time and that she would like to take off her outdoor things, and steadily, though with inward tremulousness, little suspected by the two others, she made her way to the house.
“Betty,” said Eira, when sure that Frances was beyond earshot. “Betty, do you hear me, what does she mean?”
But for all answer Betty turned her head away, so that her face was quite hidden from her sister, and only by the convulsive movement of her shoulders did Eira know that she had burst into uncontrollable tears.
“Never again,” thought Eira to herself, “will I meddle with or even think of other people’s affairs of this kind! There have I been for months past wearing myself out with hopes and anxieties about Frances and Horace Littlewood. And for all I know now, torturing Betty! Who would have dreamt of such a thing? It is rather too bad of Frances not to have given me some idea of how the land lay, for from her very superior well-informed manner, it is evidently not new to her. As to Betty, I don’t know what I feel. She might have—no, I don’t see that she could have acted differently, but I won’t call her cross or depressed any more. Poor little Betty! Still, on the whole, for the present, I think I had better leave her alone.”
And Eira, feeling considerably discomposed and “out of it,” not yet able to realise that this new turn of affairs might bring as much cause for congratulation as the fulfilment of the hopes on which she told herself she had wasted so much care and thought—Eira, swinging her garden-hat on her arm with a great air of “nonchalance,” followed her elder sister into the house, though not upstairs. But a moment or two after she entered the drawing-room the door reopened to admit Frances. Gladly would the elder sister have remained upstairs in the quiet of her own room if but for half an hour, but this she felt she must not do. For the moment the privilege of solitude and reflection must be renounced.
“It is only a bit, a very little bit, of the whole,” she thought to herself. “Just at first, of all times, it is most important that I should seem quite like myself, and not give the very slightest opening for suspicion that things are turning out differently from what I expected. And it will not be difficult to do so, if I keep my thoughts centred at this crisis on my poor little Betty.”
And her mother’s first words as she caught sight of her brought a little glow of gratitude to her heart—not so much of gratitude to Lady Emma herself, but of thankfulness in the abstract for this first little touch of encouragement in the road she had marked out for herself.