But the stout woman held her ground.
“Not before I’ve said what I have to say,” she answered. “It is one thing, and one thing only, hinders me doing what I ought to do, and what if you were my girl I’d wish another to do. And that is—your friends may not want you back. And then, to be married tomorrow is like enough the best you can do for yourself! And the sooner the better!”
Henrietta’s face turned scarlet, and she stamped on the floor.
“You are a wicked, insolent woman!” she said. “You do not know your place, nor mine. How dare you say such things to me? How dare you? Did you hear me bid you leave the room?”
“Hoity-toity!”
“Yes, at once!”
“Very good,” Mrs. Gilson replied ponderously—“very good! But you may find worse friends than me. And maybe one of them is downstairs now.”
“You hateful woman!” the girl cried; and had a glimpse of the landlady’s red, frowning face as the woman turned for a last look in the doorway. Then the door closed, and she was left alone—alone with her thoughts.
Her face burned, her neck tingled. She was very, very angry, and a little frightened. This was a scene in her elopement which anticipation had not pictured. It humiliated her—and scared her. To-morrow, no doubt, all would be well; all would be cheerfulness, tenderness, sunshine; all would be on the right basis. But in the meantime the sense of forlornness which had attacked her in the chaise returned on her as her anger cooled, and with renewed strength. Her world, the world of her whole life up to daybreak of this day, was gone forever. In its place she had only this bare room with its small-paned casement and its dimity hangings and its clean scent. Of course he was below, and he was the world to her, and would make up a hundredfold what she had resigned for him. But he was below, he was absent; and meantime her ear and her heart ached for a tender word, a kind voice, a look of love. At least, she thought, he might have come under her window, and whistled the air that had been the dear signal for their meetings. Or he might have stood a while and chatted with her, and shown her that he was not offended. The severest prude, even that dreadful woman who had insulted her, could not object to that!
But he did not come. Of course he was supping—what things men were! And then, out of sheer loneliness, her eyes filled, and her thoughts of him grew tender and more humble. She dwelt on him no longer as her conquest, her admirer, the prize of her bow and spear, subject to her lightest whim and her most foolish caprice; but as her all, the one to whom she must cling and on whom she must depend. She thought of him as for a brief while she had thought of him in the chaise. And she wondered with a chill of fear if she would be left after marriage as she was left now. She had heard of such things, but in the pride of her beauty, and his subjection, she had not thought that they could happen to her. Now—— But instead of dwelling on a possibility which frightened her, she vowed to be very good to him—good and tender and loyal, and a true wife. They were resolutions that a trifling temptation, an hour’s neglect or a cross word, might have overcome. But they were honest, they were sincere, they were made in the soberest moment that her young life had ever known; and they marked a step in development, a point in that progress from girlhood to womanhood which so few hours might see complete.