“I am very sorry,” said Effie, “I thought——” and then she abandoned this subject altogether. “Do you think Eric will see much change?” she said.
“Eric! Oh, yes; he will see a great deal of change. The country and all look the same to be sure; it is the people who alter. He will see a great deal of change in you, Miss Ogilvie.”
Effie looked up with tears starting in her eyes as if he had given her a sudden blow.
“Oh, Ronald! why do you call me that—am I not Effie—always——” And there came a little sob in her throat, stopping further utterance.
He looked as if he could have cried too, but smiled instead strangely, and said, “When you have—another name, how am I to call you by that? I must try and begin now.”
“But I shall always be Effie, always,” she said.
Ronald did not make any reply. He raised his hands in a momentary protestation, and gave her a look which said more than he had ever said in words. And then they walked on a few steps together in silence, and then stopped and shook hands silently with a mutual impulse, and said to each other “good-bye.”
When Effie got near home, still full of agitation from this strange little opening and closing of she knew not what—some secret page in her own history, inscribed with a record she had known nothing of—she met her stepmother, who was returning very alert and business-like from a walk.
“What have you been saying to Ronald?” said Mrs. Ogilvie, “to make him look so grave? I saw him turn the corner, and I thought he had seen a ghost, poor lad; but afterwards it proved to be only you. You should not be so severe: for he has liked you long, though you knew nothing about it; and it must have been very hard upon him, poor fellow, to find that he had come home just too late, and that you had been snapped up, as a person may say, under his very nose.”
This was so strange an address that it took away Effie’s breath. She gave her stepmother a look half stupified, half horrified. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.