The visit was almost at its end. The girls were in despair.
"We won't let you go home," they told Nancy. "You must have another week, at least. Surely your father won't mind."
"Perhaps he won't," she agreed, "but I must go back and ask him."
She was no more ready than they were to have her stay finished. Time had gone so swiftly. The first few days she had been careless of its passing, as though she had the leisure of years before her, but now each day was oppressed by the closer approach of the end. It would be the end to so many things, the end to her youth, to her freedom, her all too brief season of play. Nancy wished at times she had never known these friends; she would not have missed them so. Barely a month remained till her marriage. She looked at the moon shining through the trees. Even now it was at the first quarter. The next time she should see it thus, she would be back in Peking, the centre of odious preparation, half enslaved already, and before she could see it again she would be married, hidden in some brawling Chihli village where her mother-in-law might not give her time to watch the slow processions of the sky.
The praise of the twins had awakened a delight in her own beauty. She would stand slowly undressing before the mirror, extending her arms, admiring the rounded softness of her shoulders, the glint of light upon her long silk stockings. She reddened with shame and with fear at the thought of giving her body to the mercy of a stranger.
Not new thoughts were these, but for the first time intimately felt, and by contrast the quick comradeship which prevailed in the Ferris family made their home the treasure-house of all things desirable. Whatever she might predict of her future home, she knew it would not be like theirs. She dared less to think how different it might be. She wanted security. She wanted peace of soul. She wanted the grave trust of a man like Nasmith. She did not know that, with all her rapt joy in the company of the twins, her one desire from waking till sleeping was to appear lovely in his eyes. "I was the moon—I was—" she mused once or twice, and checked herself dreaming before the long mirror.
Nasmith too had come down from counting days to counting hours. A whole ten days with Nancy near—they had promised so much and been nothing but tantalization and sorrow. And now but one day lay before him. The conversation of the dinner table turned to his rescue of Nancy a year ago. Beresford revived the story with sundry mock-heroic touches, descanting upon the execution Edward had done with his bow till he made their intervention seem merely a belated attempt to save the lives of the monks.
"Shall we go back there, Nancy?" said Nasmith, half in play, half trying to veil the bitter seriousness of his eyes, "and see if we can remember it all? It was so long ago, it has begun to seem almost a joke."
His suggestion was taken up eagerly by the girls. They had not consented to thinking of the morrow as Nancy's last day among them; she must win her father's agreement to a longer visit; but, if last day it were, a slight trembling in Ronald's voice told them he would make the most of it. So early the next day they started with all the paraphernalia of these outings to make holiday high among the rocky shoulders of the mountains. The sun shone in broad waves of light down the grassy slopes; the paths were still wet with dew.
"Who shall lead the way?" Nasmith asked.