“I can’t say.”
There is such a helpless anguish in her voice that he stops questioning her for that while; but the doubt and the explanation are sure to crop up again at the next of those dreadful meals, spent in hiding their own food, and compelling each other to swallow his or hers.
“I can’t quite understand how you kept the lead so long!”
Slightly varied, it always comes back as a question, a wonder, a reflection, and she learns to recognize with a terrible sharpness the signs of its approach. Her uncle’s own illness seems to be in abeyance, kept at arm’s length by the force of his will, and through those dreadful days of waiting his spirit maintains a strange level of exaltation.
“We put the saddle on the wrong horse when we called him Milksop!” Lavinia hears him say repeatedly, in a tone of triumph.
He is very tender in his manner towards his niece, going entirely out of his own character to entreat her to eat, and trying humbly to emulate the son he had despised in self-forgetting attentions, and he rives her heart and conscience unknowingly by the sympathy and pity for her in her tragically interrupted nuptials, which every one of his words and actions implies.
CHAPTER XXI
The day that was to have been that of Rupert Campion and Lavinia Carew’s wedding has come.
“I am always afraid of some ill luck when the bride does not change her initials,” Miss Brine has said in the Rectory school-room, in answer to the children’s lamenting comment upon the fact.
A thoughtful silence follows the governess’s utterance, broken by Phillida, who says meditatively—