‘I am alarmed,’ she said, ‘at your going so suddenly. Avice seems to think she has offended you. She did not mean to do that, I am sure. It makes me dreadfully anxious! Will you send a line? Surely you will not desert us now—my heart is so set on my child’s welfare!’
‘Desert you I won’t,’ said Jocelyn. ‘It is too much like the original case. But I must let her desert me!’
On his return, with no other object than that of wishing Mrs. Pierston good-bye, he found her painfully agitated. She clasped his hand and wetted it with her tears.
‘O don’t be offended with her!’ she cried. ‘She’s young. We are one people—don’t marry a kimberlin! It will break my heart if you forsake her now! Avice!’
The girl came. ‘My manner was hasty and thoughtless this morning,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Please pardon me. I wish to abide by my promise.’
Her mother, still tearful, again joined their hands; and the engagement stood as before.
Pierston went back to Budmouth, but dimly seeing how curiously, through his being a rich suitor, ideas of beneficence and reparation were retaining him in the course arranged by her mother, and urged by his own desire in the face of his understanding.
3. V. ON THE VERGE OF POSSESSION
In anticipation of his marriage Pierston had taken a new red house of the approved Kensington pattern, with a new studio at the back as large as a mediaeval barn. Hither, in collusion with the elder Avice—whose health had mended somewhat—he invited mother and daughter to spend a week or two with him, thinking thereby to exercise on the latter’s imagination an influence which was not practicable while he was a guest at their house; and by interesting his betrothed in the fitting and furnishing of this residence to create in her an ambition to be its mistress.