“Will it cause you no sacrifice of your own comfort and your own plans?”
“It will cause me nothing,” he replied, “but a journey back to the City.” He rose and took his hat. “I must go there at once,” he added, “or I shall not be in time.”
“It is a promise between us?” she said, and held out her hand.
“Yes,” he answered, a little sadly; “it is a promise.”
Slight as it was, the shade of melancholy in his manner pained her. Forgetting all other anxieties in the anxiety to cheer him, she gently pressed the hand he gave her. “If that won’t tell him the truth,” she thought, “nothing will.”
It failed to tell him the truth; but it forced a question on his mind which he had not ventured to ask himself before. “Is it her gratitude, or her love; that is speaking to me?” he wondered. “If I was only a younger man, I might almost hope it was her love.” That terrible sum in subtraction which had first presented itself on the day when she told him her age began to trouble him again as he left the house. He took twenty from forty-one, at intervals, all the way back to the ship-owners’ office in Cornhill.
Left by herself, Magdalen approached the table to write the line of answer which Miss Garth requested, and gratefully to accept the proposal that had been made to her.
The second letter which she had laid aside and forgotten was the first object that caught her eye on changing her place. She opened it immediately, and, not recognizing the handwriting, looked at the signature. To her unutterable astonishment, her correspondent proved to be no less a person than—old Mr. Clare!
The philosopher’s letter dispensed with all the ordinary forms of address, and entered on the subject without prefatory phrases of any kind, in these uncompromising terms:
“I have more news for you of that contemptible cur, my son. Here it is in the fewest possible words.