“Margaret,” he said, “why should you ask me such questions? I am never angry with you; or, if I am angry, it is for love; because I would do anything you ask me, even against myself.”
Margaret smiled. Her eyes filled with something that was half light and half tears. “And me too!” she said.
Thus, without any grammar, and without any explanation, a great deal was said. Randal went to his train, and Margaret, smiling to herself, went home across the bridge. Both Jean and Grace heard her singing softly as she went up the oak staircase, and could not believe their ears. Grace cried more bitterly still to think that her darling Margaret should show so little feeling, and Jean was dumfounded that she should not be ashamed of herself—a girl just escaped from such a danger, and so nearly mixed up in a horrible story! Sir Ludovic, who had girls of his own, only laughed and shook his head. “She will have seen the right one,” he said, with a gleam of amusement to himself. Perhaps he was all the more indulgent that Aubrey, who was clearly Jean’s candidate, and far too much a man of society for plain Sir Ludovic, arrived with the cream of current scandal, and a most piquant story about Lady Grandton and a certain Duke—“the same man, you know—all come on again, as everybody prophesied,” that very night.
Rob Glen set off within forty-eight hours for the other side of the world, with Jeanie as his wife. He had not much more money than would buy the license that made this possible, and pay his passage, and would have faced the voyage and the New World without either outfit or preparation but for a timely present of a hundred pounds that reached him the night before he sailed. But he never spoke of this even to his wife, though his mother was aware of it, who—though she would not see Jeanie—saw him, and dismissed him with a stormy farewell.
“Sir Ludovic, honest man, might well say it was a heart-break to see your bairn throw himsel’ away—little we kent, him and me, how sooth he was speaking,” Mrs. Glen said. When it was all over, it gave her a little consolation to quote Sir Ludovic, what “he said to me, and I said to him,” when she met him “in the South.”
On the other hand, it cannot be denied that it was a great shock to Margaret to hear what had happened, and how soon and how completely the baffled suitor had consoled himself. “All the time it was Jeanie’s Rob,” she said to herself, with a scorching blush; and for the moment felt as deeply shamed and humbled as Rob himself had been by her indifference. And when Jean heard of these two or three words with Randal, which, indeed, as Mrs. Bellingham said indignantly, “settled nothing—for after an affair of that kind what is to hinder her having a dozen?” she was very angry, and planted thorns in Margaret’s pillow. But Jean will not be supreme forever over her little sister’s life.
THE END.