"I drag you in! Ah, see how selfish we are without knowing!" said Carry. "I thought only that between Mr Torrance and myself—there would be little amusement."
"Amusement!" cried Nora—"always amusement! Is that all that is ever to be thought of even at a dinner-party?"
Carry was too serious to take up this challenge. "Dear Nora," she said, "I am afraid of John Erskine, though I cannot tell you why. I think Mr Torrance tries to irritate him: he does not mean it,—but they are so different. I know by my own experience that sometimes a tone, a look—which is nothing, which means nothing—will drive one beside one's self. That is why I would rather he did not come; and when he comes, I want some one—some one indifferent—to help me to make it seem like a common little dinner—like every day."
"Is it not like every day? Is there—anything? If you want me, Carry, of course there is not a word to be said." Nora looked at her with anxious, somewhat astonished eyes. She, too, was aware that before Carry's marriage—before the family came to Lindores—there had been some one else. But if that had been John, how then did it happen that Edith——Nora stopped short, confounded. To her young imagination the idea, not so very dreadful a one, that a man who had loved one sister might afterwards console himself with another, was a sort of sacrilege. But friendship went above all.
"I do not think I can explain it to you, Nora," said Lady Caroline. "There are so many things one cannot explain. Scarcely anything in this world concerns one's very self alone and nobody else. That always seems to make confidences so impossible."
"Never mind confidences," cried Nora, wounded. "I did not ask why. I said if you really wanted me, Carry——"
"I know you would not ask why. And there is nothing to tell. Mr Torrance has had a mistaken idea. But it is not that altogether. I am frightened without any reason. I suppose it is as my mother says, because of all the old associations he brings back. Marriage is so strange a thing. It cuts your life in two. What was before seems to belong to some one else—to another world."
"Is it always so, I wonder?" said Nora, wistfully.
"So far as I know," Carry said.
"Then I think St Paul is right," cried the girl, decisively, "and that it is not good in that case to marry; but never mind, if you want me. There is nothing to be frightened about in John Erskine. He is nice enough. He would not do anything to make you uncomfortable. He is not ill-tempered nor ready to take offence."