Bernard had not been quite open with his sister. At that very moment Miss Laurenson was sitting in her room with her face in her hands and an outspread letter before her. She had received it in the afternoon, and thus it ran:
“Dear Miss Laurenson,—You showed yesterday that you did not want me to speak, so I am not going to bother you with a tête-à-tête. I am writing this instead, to tell you that Fanes brings in about three-fifty a year net, and in the past five years I have saved over a thousand out of this, which invested in Guaranteed Egyptians at four per cent. brings it up to four hundred. I also expect the value of the property to go up. My age is twenty-eight, and I am in sound health. I have a fairly good temper. I have not done anything that I should be ashamed of you seeing, barring getting tipsy half a dozen times before I was twenty, and carting manure. I used to poach on Merton’s land one time, but only when I thought he sold the game. I never have thought about any other girl but you. Will you, if you think you can take me, just put some white roses in your dress to-night? If you wear red ones, I shall take it to mean No. I hope very much you won’t wear red ones. I am sorry I can’t send you any flowers, but our roses were all blighted this year, and anyway I know Merton has plenty in his garden.
“Ever yours with devotion,
“Bernard de Beaufort Fane.”
Having laughed over this letter till she cried, Angela was now almost ready to cry in good earnest. After great searchings of heart she had come to admit that Bernard was all the world to her; but she would much have preferred to renounce the world and remain her maiden self. Angela was a little ascetic. Though she loved him truly, it cost her a bitter struggle to admit a man into her life; especially a man such as Bernard, who would gently brush away all her delicate scruples and cobwebs of privacy, and take possession of her, body and soul. She could trust him to be gentle, but would he understand? To Angela, wifehood seemed a strange and terrible thing. She feared it—she feared its prelude of betrothal: seeing herself more clearly than at other times, she confessed that hers was the nature for obeying, Bernard’s for ruling. And how she should fare if her lover turned tyrant?
“I’ve brought your flowers,” Lal said, coming in with a cluster of white roses and ferns. They were prettily arranged, though a little stiff. But Angela looked doubtful.
“Don’t you care for them? I thought they went well with your dress.”
“I do like them; but—” Angela pushed over Bernard’s letter and looked away. Lal smiled as he read it.
“Well, and aren’t you going to wear them?”
“Shall I?”