It was the first time she had been first at the place of meeting, and her heart beat as she sat and waited. She, who had shrunk from the prospect of this meeting, she became alarmed now lest he should not come, and longed for him with a kind of sick anxiety. Oh that he would come, that she might get it over! She did not know what it was to be, but instinctively felt that there must be something painful in this last meeting. The last! She would not be sorry to have met, perhaps, when she was away and had no longer any chance of seeing him. She would understand better what he meant, and what she herself meant; and there is something which subdues the pride in thus waiting for one who does not come. She did not seem so sure that it was he who cared, that it was he only who would break his heart, as she sat there alone; and she had almost lost herself in fancies more bitter than any she had yet known—in dreamy realization of her loneliness and a sense that no one, perhaps, would care much when she went away. Who did care? Not Ludovic, who wished her to do well, but would not have suffered much had Margaret died with her father; nor his wife, who was very kind, but had so many girls of her own; nor Effie, though she would cry and think she was sorry. Nobody would care; and Jean and Grace would often find her a trouble; and nobody in the world belonged to Margaret, cared for her above everything else, was happy when she was happy, and grieved when she was sorry;—nobody—except, perhaps, him alone.
“Margaret!” A low eager voice that seemed the very essence of subdued delight, trembling with satisfaction and happiness, and he suddenly made a spring to her side from under the trees, through which he had been threading his way to the place of meeting. He threw himself on his knees by her, and seized and kissed her hands a hundred times. “You here before me! waiting for me! To think I should have lost a moment of the little time I may have you! I shall never forgive myself; but I thought it was too early for you, even now.”
“Oh, I have not been waiting long,” she said. “It was because we dined so early; and then they were all—tired.”
“Except my Margaret. God bless my Margaret, that came out and took the trouble to wait for me! How often I have sat here and watched for the sweep of your dress at the corner of the house, for the least sign of you! And to think that you should have been first to-night, and waiting—”
“Why should not I wait,” she said, “as well as you? And to-morrow I am going away.”
“To-morrow!” he cried, in a voice of despair. “How am I to endure it? how am I to go on without you? I am afraid to think of it, my darling. Margaret! Margaret! what are you going to say to me to give me strength to get through to-morrow, and all the days after it, till we meet again?”
Now it has come! said Margaret to herself; and she felt with astonishment that the emergency seemed to give her possession of her faculties.
“I do not know,” she said, steadily, “what you want me to do or say. I shall be very sorry to go away and to—part from you. But what can I do? My sisters have the right to do what they think proper with me; and I think I ought, too, to go and see my own house. I would like to take Bell or somebody, but they will not let me. And now that Ludovic is here and his family, it is natural that I should go away.”
“Yes; but first say something to comfort me, Margaret. I did not suppose you could stay here forever: but tell me you love me, and will be faithful to me. Tell me when I may come after you?”
“Come after me?” she exclaimed, with a certain dismay.