Poor Hope Oswald! she had been too sensible—she had defeated her own well-digested, painfully-constructed plan. Miss Swinton instead of a powerful auxiliary threatened to become the most hopeless barrier in her way, and Hope was almost in despair. She began immediately to belie Edinburgh; to manufacture grievances; and to represent how very hard, especially for the teachers, was the laborious life at school; but Helen’s fixed dreamy, unconscious face warned her it was all lost, and very disconsolately she said good-night.
“My father would be pleased enough if it was Miss Maxwell,” thought Hope with some disdain, as she went home, “all because Mr Graeme will leave her Mossgray. I wish somebody would give Helen a place like Mossgray—but I don’t either—because Helen is better than we are, though she is poor. Who’s that?”
Hope’s reverie concluded very abruptly—who was it?
Alas, it was the interesting, sentimental, young minister newly placed in the church of Fendie, whom all the town delighted to honour. He did not see her as he went steadily down the dim road, and the dismayed Hope stood still to watch him, with prophetic terror. Yes, indeed, it is Mrs Buchanan’s gate he stops at; and now the door is opened, and a flash of warm light shines for a moment into the garden, and the Reverend Robert Insches is admitted. Burning with suppressed anger, the jealous Hope hurried home, eager to defy and defeat her father, and utterly to destroy any presumptuous hopes which the Reverend Robert Insches might entertain in regard to Helen Buchanan.
CHAPTER X.
The morning rises dimly,
There are clouds and there is rain,
But always the sun is there—
So softly breaking, parting like the mists
About the hills, the dismayed sorrow looses
Her heavy veil and cloak of mourning from her,
And sometimes smiling, sometimes weeping, like
The skies in April, lifts her head again,
And looks upon the light.
“Miss Maxwell,” said Hope Oswald, as she sat on a low chair by the side of Lilias on the morning of Hallowe’en, the last day she was to spend at home: “you have never seen Helen Buchanan yet;—I should like so much to let you see her before I go away.”
“And you are going away to-morrow, Hope?” said Lilias.
“Yes,” said Hope, disconsolately; “my father is to take me to-morrow. I should be so glad, Miss Maxwell, if you only knew Helen.”
“Well, Hope,” said Lilias, “you must contrive to introduce us to each other to-night. I see no other way of accomplishing it.”