“I am listening; what is it?”
“It’s all settled—splendidly settled—and I’m as happy as Cinderella when she found the Prince! Now guess!”
“Well, then,” stooping to pick a weed that had gone to seed, “I guess that you have come to your right mind, that you will marry Stacey on Friday and all will go as merry as a marriage bell should.”
“What a thing to guess! That’s too horrid! Guess again.”
“You have grown good and ‘steady,’ you will keep house for your father and be what he is always calling you,—the comfort of his old age,—and forego lovers and such perplexities forever.”
“That’s horrider still! Do guess something sensible.”
“You are going to marry Dr. Lake. Your father has stormed and stormed, but now he has become mild and peaceable; you are to be married Friday morning and start off immediately in the sober certainty of waking bliss.”
“Yes,” said Sue very seriously, “that is it. Every thing is as grand as a story-book, except that father will not give me the house for a wedding present. Oh, those wretched days since I saw you last! I did think that I would take laudanum or kill myself with a penknife. You don’t know what I have been through. Old Blue Beard is pious to what father has been; Gerald, he kept out of the house. I should have run away before this, only I knew that father would come around and beg my pardon. He always does.”
Tessa stooped to dip her fingers in the water.
“And this is your idea of marriage,” she said quietly.