CHAPTER XLI.
WHERE THERE'S A WILL THERE'S A WAY.
April had come, and the best of the year was beginning with a yellow dawn of daffodils. The trees stood stern and wintry, but there were little leaves on the honeysuckles and the hawthorn hedges, glad outbursts of song among the branches, and soft, shy caresses in the air. Sissy Langton, riding into Fordborough, was delicately beautiful as spring itself. She missed her squire of an earlier April, and his absence made an underlying sadness in her radiant eyes which had the April charm. That day her glance and smile had an especial brightness, partly because spring had come, and, though countless springs have passed away, each comes with the old yet ever-fresh assurance that it will make all things new; partly because it was her birthday, and while we are yet young there is a certain joy of royalty which marks our birthday mornings; but most of all because that day gave her the power to satisfy a desire which had lain hidden in her heart through the long winter months.
It was the Fordborough market-day, and already, though it was but eleven o'clock, the little town was waking up. Sissy, followed by Mrs. Middleton's staid servant, rode straight to the principal street and stopped at Mr. Hardwicke's office. Young Hardwicke, reading the paper in his room, was surprised when a clerk announced that Miss Langton was at the door asking for his father. He forgot the sporting intelligence in an instant: "Well, isn't my father in?"
No: Mr. Hardwicke went out about twenty minutes earlier, and did not say when he should be back. They had told Miss Langton, and she said, "Perhaps Mr. Henry—"
Mr. Henry was off like a shot. He found Sissy on her horse at the door, looking pensively along the street, as if she were studying the effect of dusky red on palest blue—chimney-pots against the April sky.
"So Mr. Hardwicke is out?" she said when they had shaken hands. "I'm so sorry! I wanted him so particularly."
"Is it important? Are you in a great hurry?" said Henry. "He won't be long, or he would certainly have left word—on a market-day especially. Could you come in and wait a little while?" he suggested. "I suppose I shouldn't do as well?"
"I don't know," said Sissy, looking a little doubtfully at the tall, fresh-colored young fellow, who smiled frankly in reply.
"Oh, it isn't at all likely," said Mr. Henry with delightful candor. "The governor can't, for the life of him, understand how I make so many blunders. I've a special talent that way, I suppose, but I don't know how I came by it."