She had more than one offer just at this period. The neighbouring country houses were full of men who had come to Huntsdean for the shooting. They admired Nelly riding by her father’s side, and looking vigorous and blooming in her habit and hat. They met her now and then at a dinner-party, and straightway fell in love with her chestnut hair and brown eyes, and were not unmindful of the handsome dowry that would go with these charms. She was wont to say, long afterwards, that her unconscious attachment to another was a safeguard of God’s providing. Many a woman speaks the fatal Yes, because her heart furnishes her with no reason for saying No.
Robert Channell encouraged the curate to come often to his house; but no one hinted that he thought of him as a possible son-in-law. It was too absurd to suppose that he would give his Nelly to a man who had only a hundred-and-fifty a year, and was encumbered with an old father and mother, living in obscurity. Some of the disappointed suitors remarked that Channell was a fool to have the parson hanging about the place;—there was no counting on the whims of a spoiled beauty, who might take it into her head to fling herself away on a curate. But this notion was not generally entertained, and the intimacy increased without exciting much notice.
Christmas had come and gone. It was the last day of the old year; Nelly, sitting alone by the drawing-room fire, was seriously taking herself to task, and asking her own heart why the world was so very desolate that day? True, the ground was covered with snow; but the afternoon sky was bright with winter sunshine. The brown woodlands took rich tinges from the golden rays that slanted over them, and scarlet berries glistened against the garden wall. Nelly had wrapped a shawl round her shoulders, and had laid the blame of her low spirits on a cold.
“But the cold is not to blame,” owned the girl to herself. “When one has a friend—such a friend as Mr. Foster—one does not like him to stay away from the house for a week; and one cannot bear to hear that he is always at the rectory when Miss White is there! And yet it ought not to matter to me!”
It mattered so much that the tears in Nelly’s brown eyes began to run down her cheeks. At that very moment the drawing-room door was thrown open, and the page announced Mr. Foster.
The curate advanced a few paces, and stopped in sudden dismay. There was something so pathetic in Nelly’s pale, tearful face, that he was stricken speechless for a moment. And then he recovered himself, and began to make anxious inquiries which she scarcely knew how to answer.
“Nothing has happened, Mr. Foster,” she sobbed. “I am only crying because I am in low spirits.”
“Shall I go away now, and call to-morrow?” asked the bewildered young man in his embarrassment.
“No,” said Nelly, suddenly looking up through her tears; “I shall be a great deal worse if you leave me to myself!”
Her face told him more than her words. In a moment the truth flashed upon him, and covered him with confusion. A vainer man, or one less occupied in earnest work, would have seen it far sooner. Morgan Foster took a chair by her side, and felt his heart throbbing as it had seldom throbbed before. There was but one thing to be done, and he was going to do it.