“Oh, Mr. Glen!” said Margaret, “I ought to let you know at once, we are going away.”
“Do not, for Heaven’s sake, call me Mr. Glen! Do you want to make me very unhappy, to take away all pleasures from me? Surely the time is over in which you should call me Mr. Glen. You cannot want to play with me and make me wretched, Margaret?”
“No,” she said, with a tremor in her voice; “I will call you by your name, as I used to do when I was little. But it is quite true that I said—we are going away.”
“Going away? Where are you going, and who are we? Oh yes, I knew it was not likely they would stay here,” cried Rob, with mingled irritation and despair. “Where are they going to take you, my Margaret?—nowhere that I cannot come and see you, nowhere that I will not follow you, my darling. I would go after you to the world’s-end.”
“I am going with my sisters, Jean and Grace. They are my guardians now. I am to live with them till—for three years at least, till I am twenty-one; then they say I can do what I like. What does it matter now about doing what I like? I do not think I care what becomes of me, now that I have no one, no one that has a right to me! and they will not even let me cry.”
She began to weep, and he did not stop her, though his mind was full of impatience. He drew her to him close, and this time she did not resist him.
“Cry there,” he said, “Margaret—my Margaret! I will never try to keep you from crying. Oh! he deserved it well. He loved you better than all the earth. You were the light of his eyes, as you are of mine. They! what does it matter to them? They will bother you; they will make you do what they like; they will not worship you as he did, and as I do. But, Margaret, there is still one that has a right to you. Had he known, had I but had the courage to go and tell him everything, he would have given you to me; I am certain he would. He would have thought, like you, that it was better, far better for you, to have some one of your very own. The others! what are you to them? But to him you were everything, and to me you are everything. Margaret! say this, darling! Say, Rob, I am yours; I will always be yours, as you are mine!”
Margaret looked in his face with her wet eyes. But she did not say the words he dictated to her. Her heart was full of emotion of another kind. She was thankful to Rob for his kindness, and he was not like—any one else; he had a special standing-ground of his own with her. To nobody else could she talk as she was talking, on nobody else would she lean; but still it did not occur to her to obey him, to say what he asked her to say.
“I found that picture you made,” she said, “only to-day. It is him, just himself. I took it away to my own room that nobody might see it. It must have been some angel that put it into your mind to do that.”
“Yes, Margaret,” he said, “it was an angel, for it was you. And it was not I that did it, but love that did it; but if you will give it to me, I will make it still more like him. I will never forget how he looked, and how you looked—and my heart all full, and running over with love, which I dared not say.”