‘It would have been better,’ was the sad reply. ‘I tell you these things that you may understand the proposal I am about to make to you. I now know what love is, and as too often happens, the knowledge comes too late. But it will help me in my effort to make two people happy. Can you guess who they are?’
‘I am afraid you must inform me.’
‘Yourself and Ma—Miss Heathcote. I propose that you should stay at home and marry as soon as may be agreeable to the lady. I shall settle upon you a sufficient fortune to enable you to live comfortably; but I shall expect you to enter some profession. Do you consent?’
Here was a proposal at which Philip’s whole nature jumped gleefully. But that voice was in his ears, and he overcame the temptation.
‘It was my mother’s wish that I should go, if my uncle ever summoned me,’ he said in a respectful but decisive voice, ‘and I must go.’
‘So be it,’ rejoined the father, and there was a note of bitterness in his tone; ‘I shall not again attempt to alter your plans.’
There was a peculiar emphasis on the ‘I.’
CHAPTER VIII.—‘WILL YOU SPEAK THAT WORD?’
Madge was singing as she dressed in her pretty little room, filled with the exhilarating breath of the early morning, which the wide open window admitted freely. This was no dainty lady’s chamber full of costly nick-knacks. Everything in it was useful, and everything was so bright and simple, that glancing into it on a winter’s day, one might have imagined that summer still lingered here.
As she stood at the chintz-draped toilet-table she could see the green glades apparently rising amidst the trees, one glade half in shadow, another with its dewdrops glistening like diamonds in the morning sunshine. Beyond that on the high ground were yellow plains of ripe grain, relieved by black and gray patches, which she knew to be fields of beans and tares. Down below there, at the foot of the meadows, the calmly flowing river sent silver flashes through every space left by the willows and elms. Farther on, she saw the stumpy tower of the old village church struggling to raise its head through a mass of ivy. And to all this her window, with its surrounding network of rose-tree branches, formed a suitable frame.