Michael was fulfilling his promise nobly. Audrey knew him well enough to be sure that those meetings with Cyril were by no means accidental. 'Whatsoever thou doest, do it with thy might,' was a precept literally obeyed by Michael Burnett. When he held out that right hand of fellowship to his rival, there was no sense of grudging in his mind. If a cheery word or two would brighten Cyril's day, and make his hard life a little less unendurable, Michael would speak that word at the cost of any inconvenience to himself. Audrey may be forgiven if she cherished the notion that Michael's frequent visits to London were undertaken more for Cyril's benefit than his own; and if Michael could have given a somewhat different version of his motives, he kept all such interpretation to himself.
CHAPTER XLV
AUDREY RECEIVES A TELEGRAM
'One fourth of life is intelligible, the other three-fourths is unintelligible darkness; and our earliest duty is to cultivate the habit of not looking round the corner.'—Mark Rutherford.
| 'Thou shalt lose thy life, and find it; thou shalt boldly cast it forth; And then back again receiving, know it in its endless worth.' Archbishop Trench. |
Audrey thought it was the longest summer term that she had ever known; never in her life had weeks or months passed so slowly.
To all outward appearance she was well and cheerful, and spent her time much as usual—helping her mother and visiting her poor people in the morning, and in the afternoon attending cricket matches or playing tennis at the various garden-parties of the season. The nine days' wonder about the Blakes' sudden disappearance was over, and the Rutherford ladies no longer whispered strange tales into each other's ears—each more marvellous than the last. It was said and believed by more than one person that Audrey's engagement had been broken off because Dr. Ross had discovered that there was hereditary insanity in the Blake family; indeed, one lady—a notorious gossip, and who was somewhat deaf—was understood to say that she had heard Mrs. Blake was at that moment in a private lunatic asylum.
That Audrey Ross did not take her broken engagement much to heart was the general opinion in Rutherford. Would a girl play tennis, dance, or organise picnics, they said, if she were languishing in heart-sickness?—and there was certainly no appearance of effort in the readiness with which Audrey responded to any plan that her young friends proposed. As they remarked, 'Audrey Ross was always up to fun.' But Michael Burnett could have told them a different story if they had asked him. Audrey's sweet, sound disposition made her peculiarly alive to a sense of duty.