Page 41
As he talked, she studied his face. How had she not noticed his interesting brows above a rather nice shade of brown eyes? His jawline, while not the sort that was most admired by some, was quite a good one. He was, she suddenly discovered, quite extraordinarily pleasant to look at; and she did not know how long she had been finding it so.
“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. Tregarth, catching her eye. He flushed. “I have been running on.”
“Please do not stop,” said Margaret.
When the aunt rose, and the ladies followed to retire to the drawing-room, she found that she had, without knowing it, been sitting turned entirely toward him. As she came to this realisation, she was quite startled to find the room was filled with six others, when all the while Mr. Tregarth had spoken, it had been as if the whole room had been occupied by only the two of them, every other person having disappeared.
She had trouble sleeping that night; and it was towards two in the morning, when the house had been quiet for an hour, that she got up, and put on her wrapper, and went softly down the passage to her sister’s door.
Marianne was awake. She had a candle on the table beside her, and a book that she was not reading, and the Colonel’s coat upon the chair; and she looked up, at her sister’s step, with an expression that was so perfectly calm and so entirely without surprise that Margaret stopped on the threshold.
“You knew I would come.”
“I hoped you would.”
She came in, and sat on the end of the bed, and drew her knees up under her wrapper, and looked at the floor; and it was some time before she said, in a very low voice:
“Marianne. I think that I am in love with Mr. Tregarth.”
“I know,” said Marianne.
“You know?”
“I have known since the fish.”
“The —” Margaret stared. “Oh, Marianne. You cannot have known. I did not know myself. I have been so sure, all this time, that I wanted something more; and I have been waiting for it to come in at the door, like a person in a play, and be splendid; and I never once thought that it might be sitting in a corner, in a coat that does not fit, saying I beg your pardon.” She laughed shakily and put a hand over her face. “He talked to me about granite. For an hour. I have not been so happy since Niagara.”
“That is a very good sign.”
“Is it?”
“It is the best I know,” said Marianne. “It is a great deal better than fire.” She reached out, and took her sister’s hand, and held it. She said, after a pause, very gently: “I shall say only two things, and then I shall be quiet. The first is that you must tell Mr. Grant, and kindly, and soon; it is the only cruelty in this affair that can be avoided. He is a much better person than you think, and he does not deserve to be kept waiting.”
“I know.”
“And the second is, that you will have to be the one to bring up the subject to Mr. Tregarth yourself.”
“Marianne!”
“He will never say it first. He thinks of you as a comet, my dear. He believes that he is very thankful to be allowed to look at you through a telescope; and it would not occur to him in a hundred years that a person of your talents could possibly want him.” She smiled, quite tenderly. “I am sorry to say it, but some men do not know what to do. Someone must tell him. It will not be the Colonel. It cannot be Mamma. It will have to be you.”
There was a long silence. The candle guttered, and a small breath of night air came in at the window and lifted the edge of the curtain.
“I do not know what to say.”
“I should begin,” said Marianne, “with something that is not about rocks.”
Chapter XXVI.
She wrote two notes that same night, upon her knee, in the light of a candle stub, in her narrow bedroom looking out on the mews. The first was easily done and sealed.
The second took her three attempts and was in the end no more than three lines. It said:
Dear Mr. Tregarth, would you be so good as to call tomorrow at eleven? I have something to ask you, and it is not about rocks. Yours, M. D.
She looked at it for a very long time. Then, with a sensation of jumping off a very high place, she folded it, and sealed it, and left it upon the hall table for the first footman in the morning.
An answer to the first note came back within the half-hour, on a scrap of cream-laid paper, in a large careless hand, and was exactly four words long.
