And so, by and by, Peggy grows to walk her ploughshares with as unshrinking a foot as if they were velvet turf; grows to thank God again for her garden, and to be able to thank Him even for that one glimpse of the supremest good, though given but to be withdrawn; last of all, to acquiesce in that withdrawal. Since she is so urgently needed by the poor little life beside her, it is as well, so she tells herself, that she should have no distracting life of her own to pull her two ways. Whatever else her Prue loses, she can now never lose her.
And as time goes on, it seems as if Prue, too, were to have her losses. The first of these is perhaps but a little one, merely the loss of that promised company of her betrothed through those rich June days when Oxford is holding her yearly riot of pleasure—the riot from which he had joyfully engaged to steal away to her quiet side. But, as has happened not unfrequently before in Freddy's history, as it may be confidently predicted will happen not unfrequently again, he has promised more than when pay-day comes he is able to perform. After all, it seems—and at that poor Prue would be the last to wonder—Commemoration cannot get on without him.
Strange as it may appear, among the crowd, unusually large this year, that throngs to the fair city for her saturnalia, and extensive as is the acquaintance among undergraduates of the Hartley family—two of the sons, indeed, being at the present time members of the University—there is no one who is found capable of doing the honours of the festival to these comparatively new acquaintance with the exception of Mr. Ducane. He is therefore compelled, in compliance with his own creed of, as he very nobly says in his letter to Prue, 'making Self march last in the Pageant of Life,' to forego the simple joys he had planned in his sweetheart's company, and carry his absent, yearning heart through the bustle of theatre, ball, and fête. It is not until the last moment that he has announced to Prue his change of project, not until all her little preparations for his reception had been made, all the flowers gathered to be laid on the altar of the poor soul's God.
'He might have told you before,' says Peggy indignantly, when one morning the news of this defalcation is brought her by a trembling-lipped pale Prue.
'He did not know it himself,' replies the other, in eager defence; 'he says so somewhere, doesn't he?' (turning over the pages in feverish search); 'or if he did know, it was out of consideration for me that he kept me in the dark, that I might have less time to be disappointed in; and he was right. I have had all these weeks—all this hope and looking forward—to the good.'
Her under-lip quivers so piteously, as she makes this cheerful statement of her gains, that she puts up her hand in haste to hide it. But after all, Commemoration is only a matter of four days; and perhaps it is worth while to have the pleasure of his company deferred for that short interval, for the sake of the still higher pleasure she receives on his return, of hearing him read aloud to her a choice little poem he has found time to write on the subject of his own distraught wandering through the gay throng; questioning every maid he meets as to why she was not Prue. After he is gone, Prue repeats it—she has already learnt it by heart—with sparkling eyes to her sister. It is not only that it is so beautiful, as she says, but it is so true. Nobody could write like that, unless he felt it, could he now? Peggy is spared the pain of a reply by her sister's hurrying off to copy out the lines into that gold-clasped, vellum-bound volume, in which, written out in his sweetheart's best hand, the productions of Mr. Ducane's muse find a splendid shelter, until that surely near moment when rival publishers will snatch them from each other. She has plenty of time to devote her best penmanship to them, as it turns out; since after two days at the Manor, Freddy has to be off again. It is to London this time that a harsh necessity drives him. Freddy never 'goes,' or 'wishes to go.' He always 'has to go.'
'Whatever happens, we must not lose touch with the Great World-Heart beating outside us!' he has said, looking solemnly up at the stars over his betrothed's head, hidden sobbingly on his breast.
And she, though she knows little, and cares less, about the Great World-Heart, acquiesces meekly, since he must be right. So the Red House relapses into its condition of female tranquillity; a tranquillity of two balked young hearts beating side by side. The one pastures her sorrow on the name that now appears almost daily among the titled mob that crowds the summer columns of the Morning Post. The other digs hers into the garden; paints it into pictures for the workhouse; turns it into smiles for the sorrowful; stitches it into clothes for the naked.
The stillness of high summer is upon the neighbourhood; all the leafy homes around emptied of their owners; the roses, ungathered, shedding their petals, or packed off in wet cotton-wool to London. Milady is in London. So are the Hartleys. So is everybody; everybody, that is, except the Evanses. The Evanses are at home. They mostly are. A family of their dimensions, even in these days of cheap locomotion, does not lend itself to frequent removals. A couple of years ago, indeed, milady good-naturedly whisked off the Vicar for a fortnight's Londoning. But he came back so unaffectedly disgusted with his cure, his offspring, and his spouse, that the latter cherishes a hope, not always confined to her own breast, that this act of hospitality may never be repeated. And hay-harvest comes. The strawberries ripen, and jam-making begins. The Evans boys are home for the holidays; and one of them breaks his leg. The threatened baby arrives; and all the little events, habitual in the Red House's calendar, happen punctually; for even the Vicarage fracture is not more than the usual and expected outcome of the summer holidays. But neither hay-time, nor hot jam-time, nor holiday-time bring back Freddy to the Manor, whither his country-loving aunt has hastened back joyfully to spud and billycock and shorthorns, a round month ago. He does not even write very often. How should he? as Prue says. How could any one who knows anything of London expect it of him? But in all his letters, when they do come, there is invariably an underlying ring of sadness, that proves to demonstration how cogent though unexplained are the reasons which alone keep him from that dear and sacred spot, where alone, as he himself says, his soul reaches its full stature. But at length, apparently, the occult causes relax their hold of him; and when August has begun to bind her gold stooks, and the cuckoo has said good-bye, he comes. In August. It is a month to whose recurrence Peggy has looked forward with dread: to her a month of anniversaries. Happily it is only to herself that they are anniversaries. Who but she will remember that on such a day the fox bit Talbot? Dingo himself has certainly forgotten it; though he is as certainly quite ready to do it again, if the chance is afforded him. Who will know, or even suspect, that such and such days are made bitter to her by the fact that on their fellows in last year he drove the mowing-machine, or gathered the lavender, or cut out the new flower-bed? She smiles half sarcastically, wrapping herself securely in the cloak of her little world's entire indifference to her epoch-making moments.
'One has no windows in one through which one's friends can look in at one,' she says philosophically, 'even if they would take the trouble. Mrs. Evans perhaps would take the trouble; I do not know any one else that would. As long as one is not foolish outside, it does not matter; and I am not foolish outside.'