"Isabella--if I lost him--to-morrow--still, I have known--but he is not going to die, he is going to live."

"The doctor thinks so?"

"Yes; he says there is no reason why he should not live out his allotted span of life--those were his words."

Isabella did not speak--she was thinking only of Francis, and not at all of the girl beside her. Which was best for him? Would it not be kinder, happier, if he died now before he knew? Her face was very grave and sad; so much so, indeed, that Philippa repeated the words she had spoken, "He will not die. And I have promised to marry him."

"The difficulties are enormous." The words broke from Isabella half against her will. Of what use to speak of difficulties to the girl whose mind refused to acknowledge the existence of any?

"I have planned it all," continued Philippa, without heeding Isabella's words. "We shall be married and go straight abroad. It would not be good for him to be in England for the winter. He needs brightness and warmth and sunshine, and I shall take him to some quiet place where he can have them--where there is no one he has ever known before, to disturb him, or make him worry because he does not remember."

"Do you think he tries to remember?"

"I do not know. He certainly remembers something of the past. I mentioned your name to him the other day, and he replied quite naturally and quite calmly, 'Dear old Isabella! she was always a good friend.' So you see he does remember."

A painful flush rose in Isabella's sallow cheeks, but she said no word.

Was this the message she had waited for so long? Casual words repeated with a cruelty that was quite unconscious on Philippa's part.

She too was thinking only of Francis, and not at all of this woman who had loved him in silence for so long. But with the wound comfort came to Isabella in the knowledge of the meed of praise the words contained.

It was something to know that Francis remembered her, and more to know that he recalled her as a good friend. What more could she expect?

Then, taking her love and her longing with both hands, she laid them a sacrifice before the welfare of the man she loved, and made the renunciation of her one hope without a quiver in her voice.

"I think you are perfectly right," she said. "It is most important that he should not see--any one--he knew in the old days. It would only disturb and perplex him, and if you take him abroad you will be able to guard him from every danger of this kind."

"Yes," said Philippa eagerly, "that is what I feel. I shall try and explain it to Marion, but I am afraid it will not be easy to make her understand. If he sees the Major I am sure he will begin to wonder, and Marion and the child would puzzle him dreadfully. But right away in Italy, or somewhere he has never been before, there would be no danger of anything of the kind. He can start a fresh life altogether.

"I did not really want him to live, Isabella," she continued presently.

"I thought it would be better for him to go out of it all, out of all the bewilderment and trouble; but that was before--I knew--I loved him.

And now, you cannot wonder that I want him to live. My life shall be devoted to taking care of him. Oh, how I wish you could see him, Isabella! You would see that what I say is true. He is so happy, so light-hearted. I think he must be just what he used to be when he was a boy.

"I had a long talk with poor old Goodie last night. She is in the seventh heaven of delight because the nurse is leaving. She has been so jealous of her, poor old soul. You can hardly wonder at it, can you? She told me exactly what she and Keen had arranged. He is going to sleep in the next room because, as she said, much as she would like to be next to Francis, she did not wake as easily as she used to, and she might not hear him if he called; but she is to take in his early cup of tea so as to have a look at him before any one else. 'I know just how he likes it,' she a.s.sured me. 'Two lumps of sugar and a dash of cream.' Her devotion is quite pathetic, and she nearly made me cry last night when she invited me into her room and showed me all her most precious possessions. They had all to do with Francis. His first pair of gloves, such tiny things with fingers about an inch long, his baby shoes, his favourite playthings, beginning with a worsted rabbit and ending with his last tennis racquet. She had a cupboard full of them.

And she was so proud of all his presents to her, particularly of a blue china mug which she told me he had bought for her with his own money when he was seven years old. The dear old woman couldn't stop talking of him, and I didn't know whether to laugh or to cry. She showed me letters she had from him when he first went to school. The first one he wrote began 'Darling Goodie,' and ended up 'Your loving little Boy.'

Well, it appears that she did not think this was a suitable way for him to address her, so she wrote and told him that he was not to write like that again, but to remember his position, and that G.o.d had made him her superior. He wrote back 'Darling Goodie,' and ended up 'Your loving little superior Boy.' I saw the letter written in a sprawling childish hand with a line of crosses for kisses at the bottom of the page. It was rather sweet, wasn't it?

"You never heard such stories as she told me. How he once dressed up in the coachman's livery and took the brougham to fetch his mother from Renwick. It was quite dark, and she got into the carriage without noticing anything. He drove home at a fearful pace, and galloped the horses right up the drive, and pulled up at the hall door with a tremendous jerk. His mother quite thought the coachman was drunk, and as she got out she said very sternly, 'You will come to me in the library immediately, Williams.' 'Yes, darling,' said Francis, and jumped off the box and gave her a great hug. It must have been very funny."

"You would think it particularly funny if you had known Lady Louisa,"

a.s.sented Isabella. But she said nothing of a girl who had crouched behind the gatepost, shivering with cold and excitement, to watch the success of the plot which had been hatched by two playmates in the fragrant fastness of the hayloft, which had been always their favourite hiding-place. To this day the scent of hay gave Isabella a delicious tremor, a thrill of the old joyful dread of discovery, which had been the charm of the innocent conspiracies of those far-off days. That it had been her fellow-conspirator who usually undertook the carrying out of the deeds of derring-do, and that upon her had fallen the humbler task of keeping guard against any possible surprise--covering his tracks--averting suspicion--even occasionally taking the blame, though this was without his knowledge,--made no difference to her intense enjoyment. The axiom that one must lead and the other must follow had been early instilled into her by her masculine comrade, and she for her part had been only too content to follow so long as it was he who led.

She had forgotten nothing. If it came to stories about Francis as a boy, she could, had she so wished, have recounted as many as old Goodie, but she listened to the recital with a calmness that gave Philippa no hint of her real feelings.

"She showed me a lot of his drawings, too," Philippa said presently.

"It seems rather curious that he has never spoken of that, for I think he had been painting the first day I saw him. Dr. Gale told me it was one of his occupations during all the years he was ill. Perhaps he will take it up later on--it will be an interest for him."

"He used to do a good deal of it at times before he was ill," said Isabella. "At one time he had an idea of taking it up seriously, but he was always too fond of being out of doors to stick to anything that kept him in. I remember one Long Vacation he arranged a studio in one of the barns, and declared he was going to work in deadly earnest; but after a while the longing to be out became too strong to be resisted and we heard no more of his career as an artist. No one ever had such a love of nature and sunshine and the open air as he had, and he loved the place so, every field and every tree."

"I wish I had known him then. Oh, Isabella, doesn't it seem extraordinary to think of all that has happened in these last few weeks? I was in such a stupid frame of mind when I came here--so self-centred and so dissatisfied--and now, everything is changed for me. First came all the interest and the intense pity I felt, and then, little by little, love grew without my knowing it until it filled my heart, and I know that whatever happens life can never be the same again to me. It seems so wonderful that everything can be changed in a moment. Does love always come like that? The realisation of it, I mean. I suppose not. Oh, I am sorry for the people who have never felt it. I can hardly believe that I am the same person who grumbled at life being empty a little while ago, for now it is so good to be alive." She stretched out her arms with a welcoming gesture that seemed to embrace the whole world. Then she turned quickly.

"Forgive me, Isabella," she said with a little happy smile; "forgive me for talking about myself, I don't know what made me do it. I think my heart was so full it just had to come out. Now let us talk of something else. How is the book getting on?"

"Not very well, I am afraid. I must confess it has not progressed much the last few days; partly because I have not been quite in the mood for it, which is a terrible confession of weakness, and partly because Mrs.

Palling has been on the war-path.

"First of all her beloved bees have been in a most unsettled frame of mind, or so she tells me--I can't say I have seen any sign of it myself--and she a.s.sures me that something is going to happen. At first she felt certain that it was the arrival of a visitor for which they strove to prepare her. I am quite sure that it must have been your coming that is the cause of it. No one ever invaded my solitude before, and the excitement was too much for her. But as day after day pa.s.sed and no stranger arrived, she changed her mind and is now equally certain that the restlessness of her household G.o.ds portends some fearful disaster. The awkward part of it is, that even she cannot make out what form it will take; she merely tells me gloomily that something is going to happen. She has tied a bunch of herbs over the door to keep illness away, and she has presented me with a little stone which she beseeches me to carry about with me to avert accident, but even these precautions haven't comforted her much. Whenever I return home I see her waiting anxiously at the gate with a face long enough to propitiate all the G.o.ds of misfortune, and when she sees me she finds it hard to believe that I am not dragging myself home to die of some hidden wound.

"But never mind! I have known the good woman suffer from these attacks of depression before. It will pa.s.s and she will be restored to her accustomed cheerfulness. I have already told her that her symptoms point to indigestion, to which she replied darkly that by some oversight the last pig was killed at the waning of the moon, and that possibly the pork was 'a bit unheartsome' in consequence. Come and see her some day if you can. I dare say the sight of you will appease the bees and restore her to sanity."

"I will if I possibly can," returned Philippa doubtfully. "But you know, I do not like to go very far in case Francis might ask for me.

Could you not come and see me?"

Isabella hesitated. "I do not think I will come to Bessacre unless you really want me--for anything particular, I mean. If I can be of any use to you, send for me, and I will come at once; but otherwise I think it will be better not."

They parted soon afterwards, and Isabella trudged back to her home across the sunlit moor with slow and lagging step. Philippa's words had indeed "knocked at her heart and found her thoughts at home," and the old wound throbbed with a dull fierce ache. She, with her intimate knowledge of Francis, could picture to herself the whole course of recent events.

Had she not known him as a lover, wooing Phil with all the strength of his early manhood, all the force of the flood-tide of his love? Had she not seen him curbing that love lest any demonstration of too open affection might harm his cause with the woman who had not "liked heroics," wooing with innocent devices and tender subtlety? And she could almost hear the words he must have spoken when again he wooed.

Small wonder that Philippa's heart had awaked to his appeal. The fact of her own affection, although it did not entirely blind her, distorted her outlook. She only saw that Francis' peace of mind must be preserved at all costs, and it was not likely that she, who would have sacrificed herself gladly for his lightest good, could bring a clear judgment to bear upon the ethics of the case. Had she been in Philippa's place no question of abstract morality would have carried weight with her. She would have taken any action which would have saved him from distress, just as surely as she would have plunged into fire to rescue him.

She would never have stooped to casuistry or self-deception, but she would never have hesitated. She was not what may be called a religious woman as we understand the term. She believed with all her heart in a Supreme G.o.d whom she worshipped, but she could not agree to the restrictions which, it seemed to her, orthodoxy set upon His power, and she had no sympathy with women who trample heedlessly upon the feelings of others in a frantic effort to save their own souls. The truth being that Isabella, like so many of her s.e.x who lead solitary lives, had constructed for herself a curious philosophy out of the hotch-potch of maxims, theories, prejudices and principles which she called her opinions, and it had at any rate the merit of being a philosophy of self-sacrifice and self-control.

She realised that Philippa's new-found joy was built upon a delusion, that at any moment it might come tumbling about her ears, but that was hardly worth consideration, although it aroused in her a sense of pity.

She had said "Love brings suffering," and in the words she had recited a clause in her creed of life. Had she not been taught by bitter experience? Love brings suffering, yes; but that was no reason for shrinking from Love. The greater the value of anything, the greater the price which must be paid. This was not cynicism, but common sense; and it was only a coward who did not welcome the suffering as an intrinsic part of the wonderful whole, only a miser who would not pay the price.

She herself had paid it--ungrudgingly--in tears--in long years of loneliness--with empty hands. But with Philippa it was different.

Happy Philippa, who might know the delight of Love's service. It is never so hard to suffer in the forefront of the battle, it is the inaction that tortures.

CHAPTER XVIII

MARION SPEAKS HER MIND

"And truth is this to me, and that to thee."--_Idylls of the King_.

"One that would neither misreport nor lie Not to gain paradise."--_Queen Mary_.

TENNYSON

Philippa was sensible of a certain relief when the post brought no reply to her letter to Marion. To say that she was dreading her friend's answer would be over-stating the case, for the girl's present frame of mind was far too exalted, too ecstatic, to admit of anything so sobering as dread; but she could not help knowing that Marion would entirely fail to understand her actions or the motives which prompted them, and would be mystified and unhappy about her.

She had not the happy faculty which some people have of putting their thoughts on paper, lucidly and clearly, and the letter had not been an easy one to write. She had honestly tried to be frank, but when it came to writing of her love, words seemed so bald, so inadequate, that after several efforts she had given it up in despair, and merely stated simple facts. And yet she would have liked Marion to know all. It would have added to her happiness to have known that her friend sympathised and shared in it.

She never for a moment considered the possibility of an answer in person, and she was, in consequence, taken entirely by surprise when, on the afternoon of the next day, Mrs. Heathcote walked into the hall where she was sitting.

Philippa sprang to her feet. "Oh," she cried, "I never thought you would be able to come. How delightful!"

Marion returned her kiss warmly. "I felt I must see you," she said affectionately, "and I was able to leave d.i.c.kie for a little while."

"How is he?"