I promptly rose to accompany her. Marian looked as though her good-nature was becoming exhausted.
'Oh, by-the-bye, stop a moment, Miss Haddon. I shall not be in need of a companion; at least, if I have one, I should like to choose for myself; so perhaps, under the circumstances, you will not require a long notice. You couldn't expect it; and'——
'I shall not require any notice whatever from you,' was my cheerful rejoinder. 'My engagement was with Miss Farrar.'
'You forget I am Miss Farrar.'
'You will very often have to put up with my forgetfulness upon that point while I remain at Fairview,' was my mental comment. But I gravely informed her that she need have no fears about my being troublesome in any way.
Mrs Tipper had been silent during our conversation, apparently thinking over some little plan of her own; but she rose at once to accompany Lilian and me, no way deterred by Marian's protests. For the first time I noticed a quiet dignity in her bearing, which sat extremely well upon her, as she said: 'My place is by the side of my dear Lilian.'
As I had expected, an early train brought Arthur Trafford, eager to recommence his efforts to persuade Lilian to fall in with his wishes; and perhaps not without hope that, now she had had time to realise what the giving up would really be, he would find her more plastic in his hands. As I have said, such as it was, his love was sincere—only one thing seemed worse than losing her; and he would not lose her without a desperate struggle. He came, prepared to exert all his powers of persuasion. Her firmness, or obstinacy as he chose to call it, had quite taken him by surprise, and he could not as yet believe in it, being more inclined to ascribe it to temper than to conviction. He met with a little rebuff in the outset, in her unwillingness to see him alone. He had been shewn into the library, where she was sitting with Mrs Tipper and me; and in reply to his invitation to go elsewhere, she had murmured something about preferring to remain there. As he could not very well request Mrs Tipper and me to leave them, and we ourselves made no attempt to do so, having, in fact, exchanged a glance which meant not leaving Lilian without orders, he was obliged to put up with our presence.
He found her quite as unmanageable upon the one point as she had been the evening before; and in his disappointment and mortification, laid bare his own motives more than he was conscious of doing. And terrible as it was for her at the moment, I was even glad she should see him as he really was. Better that her love should be killed at one blow, since it had to be killed, than by the slow torture which a more gradual unveiling would have entailed.
As she shrank back, gazing at him with dilated eyes and white face, I knew that she had at last awakened to the truth. This was not the hero she had worshipped—a man whose capacity for doing great deeds only lacked opportunity for its development. He could not help shewing us what it was which he most felt the loss of.
Then he was impolitic enough to attack me before her; something more than insinuating that I was the marplot who had come between him and his happiness. In his heat, he could not perceive that if I were really what he accused me of being, he was paying Lilian a very bad compliment in declaring that she was completely under my influence.