The knife cuts as clean and clear as she could have wished; the divine happy rose-flush slips away suddenly out of the poor blank face opposite her; a grey ashy-white takes its place. She had thought that pain and pleasure were buried with Jack on the slope of Glan-yr-Afon's mountain graveyard; but that moment of raging agony undeceives her. For an instant the table and chairs seem dancing round; a humming buzz sounds dully in her ears; then the faintness passes; the table and chairs stand still again; the buzz ceases; and she is sitting on an old gilt chair: her arms still moving mechanically, with the outstretched wool upon them, while Constance goes winding, winding on—winding away hope and pleasure and joy; while the ball, growing larger under her hands, seems to have stolen its red colour from Esther's heart-blood.
"Our friends have really been very disagreeable to us about it," says Miss Blessington with a subdued laugh; "they tell us that it is the most uninteresting marriage they ever heard of, for that they had all foretold it, heaven knows how many centuries ago!"
"It is very seldom," replies Mrs. Blessington, shaking her head slowly to and fro, "that a young man shows the sense St. John Gerard has done in coming into his parents' views for him: in the present day they are mostly so headstrong and resolute to pick and choose for themselves, which generally ends in their selecting some worthless person utterly unsuited to their rank and fortune."
"How long have you been engaged?" asks Esther, presently, framing her words with as much difficulty as though they had been spoken in some little-known foreign tongue. Worse to her than the loss of St. John is the consciousness that that loss is written in despair's grey colours on her faded face, right under her rival's victorious eyes.
"How long? I really forget," answers Constance, with affected carelessness. "Oh, no! By-the-by, I recollect; it was almost immediately after you left Felton. I daresay" (with a smile) "that you were among the ranks of the prophets; lookers-on proverbially see most of the game."
"Indeed—no!" cries the girl, with a passionate disclaimer, the agony of loss made sharper by the humiliation of defeat. "Nothing ever struck me as more unlikely!"
"Indeed! And why, may I ask?"
The skein is finished; Esther lifts one hand to her face, and feels a slight relief in the partial shade.
"Why, pray?" with a slightly sharpened accent.
"Because—because," she answers, in confusion, "you had been brought up together from children; because Mr. Gerard's manner seemed so much more like a brother's than a—a—lover's."