“I can’t agree with you there, Batchelor. But don’t let us talk of that. I hope you will choose the time you would like best. I can easily arrange for any time.”
“I don’t know what makes you so wonderfully civil,” said I, losing patience at all this soft soap. “After all that has happened, Hawkesbury, I should have thought you might have spared yourself this gush, as far as I was concerned.”
“I would like bygones to be bygones between us, Batchelor. I know quite well I have been to blame in many things! I am sorry for them now, if it prevents our being friends.”
And he smiled sweetly.
I gave it up in disgust, and let him say what he liked. It was not worth the trouble of preventing him, unless I was prepared for an open rupture, which just then I felt would be unwise, both on Jack’s account and my own.
So he had the satisfaction of believing his sweetness had made its due impression on my savage breast, and of scoring to himself a victory in consequence.
As I had found it before, hard work proved now to be the best specific for dull spirits, and during the next few days I gave the remedy a full trial.
It seemed ages before any letter came from Packworth, and I was dying to hear. For meanwhile all sorts of doubts and fears took hold of me. How had that strange family meeting gone off? Had it been marred by Masham’s cruel letter? or was the poor lost father once more finding happiness in the sight of one whom he had last seen an infant beside his dead wife? Surely if sympathy and common interest were to count for kinship, I was as much a member of that little family as any of them!
At last the letter came. It was from Jack:
“Dear Fred,—We got down on Wednesday. Father went that night to the hotel, as his heart failed him at the last moment. I went on to Mrs Shield’s, and found your telegram on my arrival. I was horrified, but hardly surprised at what it told me. Happily, Mary was in bed, as I had not been expected till the morning, so I was able to explain all to Mrs Shield. She knew all about it before I told her; for the enclosed letter had arrived by the post in the morning, addressed to Mary. Mercifully, seeing it was in a strange hand, and, as I have often told you, being most jealously careful of Mary, Mrs Shield took it into her head to open the letter and read it before giving it to Mary, and you may imagine her utter horror. She of course did not let her see it, and thus saved the child from what would have been a fearful shock; and I was able to break it all to her gradually. Father is to come this evening—I am thankful it is all so well over.