"Good-bye, my darling," he called to her.

Prudence stood back and waved her hand to him, waved it gaily with a glad sense of relief. The last she saw of him as the train began to move out of the station was his grave face regarding her mournfully as he pulled up the window before settling down in his corner.

Prudence hurried out to the waiting carriage with her thoughts in a whirl. This business of being engaged was an altogether perplexing affair. She had not expected things to be like this somehow. She did not know quite what she had expected; but she had never imagined that the stolid Edward Morgan could a.s.sume the role of lover and confidently look for a similar response from her; she had believed he would maintain the more dignified att.i.tude of a warm and affectionate friendliness throughout their engagement; and she felt vexed and cheated because he had disappointed her in this belief.

"It's absurd," she told herself, with her hot face turned to the sharp crisp air which came through the open window, "for him to imagine I am going to let him make love to me when I only want him to be nice and kind always."

But she began dimly to apprehend that the absurdity was likely to go on.

Bobby came home for the Christmas holidays and talked to her seriously of the mistake she was making. He did not look forward to the prospect of coming home finally to find Prudence gone; and the next term at school was his last.

"Beastly rotten it will be here without you," he remarked. "You might have waited, Prue, a little longer. You don't love old Morgan, do you?"

That was a poser for Prudence.

"I'm fond of him," she answered guardedly. "He's kind, and generous.

When I am married I shall be able to do as I like."

"Rot!" he retorted. "It will mean simply exchanging one dulness for another. Then you'll vary the dullness by falling in love with some one else, and there'll be a scandal. I know you. You'll never settle down to a stick-in-the-mud existence with old Morgan. And serve him jolly well right for being such an a.s.s."

Prudence regarded him with newly awakened interest, her expression slightly aggrieved.

"I had no idea you held such a low opinion of me," she said.

He laughed.

"That's human nature, old girl. If you intend to remain faithful to old Morgan you'll not have to look at another man, because when the right man comes along you'll know it; all the wedding rings in the world won't keep you blind to facts. You chuck the silly old geyser," he counselled in the inelegant phraseology he affected, "before you tie your life into a hopeless knot."

She shook her head.

"It's not so easy," she said.

"They'd be down on you, of course. But I'd stand by you. We'd worry through."

"I didn't mean that." She attempted explanations. "He's so good and kind. You don't understand. I'd feel the meanest thing on the face of the earth if I hurt him deliberately like that. And there isn't any need. I _want_ to marry him."

"There's no accounting for tastes, of course," he said rudely, and flung out of the room in a mood of deep disgust.

The whole business of Prudence's engagement was profoundly exasperating to him. It obtruded itself at unexpected moments with an insistence that was to his way of thinking indecent. It interfered with his arrangements. So many hours of her time were given to letter writing that the size of the weekly epistle was ever a matter of suspicious amazement to him. He had no means of knowing how long those bald sentences which Prudence sprawled largely with a generous marginal s.p.a.ce over the sheet of notepaper took in their composition. He suspected that she wrote reams to the fellow and posted them on the sly.

The regular arrival of Mr Morgan's weekly effusion was a further irritation. This was handed usually to Prudence across the breakfast table with ponderous playfulness on brother William's part, and a show of sly surrept.i.tiousness, that drew general attention to the transit from his pocket to her reluctant hand.

The sorting of the letters was accompanied by such facetious subtleties as "Do we behold a billet doux?" or the murmured misquotation: "He sent a letter to his love." And the bulky envelope would be pa.s.sed to her to the accompaniment of appreciative giggles from his sisters, and received by Prudence with as unconcerned an air as the trying circ.u.mstances made possible, and left by her lying unopened on the table exposed to the general gaze while she finished her meal. She carried her letter away with her and read it in the privacy of her room.

"I can't think how you stand it," Bobby said once, when they were alone together. "If Uncle William made such fatuous remarks to me I'd hit him."

"I won't give him the satisfaction of seeing how he annoys me," she answered. "William would vulgarise the most sacred thing."

"You aren't for calling this luke-warm affair sacred, I hope?" Bobby asked with fine sarcasm. Whereupon she smiled suddenly and pulled his scornful young face down to hers and kissed it.

"It's one way out," she explained; and he was silent in face of the reasonableness of her reply.

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE.

Christmas came and brought with it Edward Morgan's gift to his fiancee, a rope of pearls, so beautiful and costly that Prudence, on taking the shining thing from its bed of velvet, and holding it in her hands, was moved with a sense of remorse at the inadequacy of the return she was making this man, who showered gifts upon her in token of his love. She did not want his presents; they were an embarra.s.sment and a distress.

The thought of wearing the pearls, as in the letter which accompanied them he requested her to do, on Christmas night, was distasteful to her on account of the continuous flow of witticism she would be forced to meet from William, who already had revealed a new inventiveness on presenting the registered package to her, and had manifested open curiosity as to its contents, which she had failed to gratify. And she dreaded the cold criticism of Bobby's appraising eye. Bobby would possibly refrain from verbal comment, but his face would express the more.

She locked the pearls away and decided that she would show them to no one; she would ignore the request that came with them. In any case they were too valuable to wear at a quiet dinner at home, at which the only guests would be Matilda and her husband, who, still in uncertainty as to his living, waited on in Wortheton in hopeful expectation. To wear the pearls in Ernest's presence, and suffer William's sly pleasantries unmoved, was more than she felt equal to. Ernest, through the medium of his wife, had expressed amazement at her engagement, which he attributed to worldly considerations.

"She is incapable of appreciating the seriousness of marriage," he had told Matilda. "Her mind is light and inclines to frivolity, and material advantages."

That his own inclination had been towards a comfortable income, was a point he was apt to overlook.

Prudence found some difficulty in writing a sufficiently appreciative acknowledgment of her lover's gift. She hated the necessity for expressing a pleasure which she did not feel.

"Your present is much too beautiful," she wrote. "I don't know how to thank you. I am overpowered. You give such wonderful things..."

She added nothing about locking the pearls away, but left it to his imagination to picture her, as he had said he would do, shining in all her girlish beauty with his pearls about her throat. She determined to take them with her to Morningside when she went in April. If he wished to see her wearing pearls, she would gratify him then.

The visit to Morningside hung over her like a nightmare. She was not allowed to forget it; Mr Morgan continually referred to it in his letters. He was having the whole place re-decorated for her; and he wrote consulting her preference in the matter of wall-papers, and her taste in tapestries. The furnishing of the house was Victorian; and he feared she might consider it a little heavy and inartistic. He wanted her to express her wishes in regard to furniture and other matters. But Prudence, taking alarm at the thought of this responsibility, flung the onus of everything on to him, and insisted that the furniture which had sufficed hitherto would a.s.suredly serve for her needs. She did not want anything changed. This proved disappointing to him. He would have liked her to show a greater interest in the home which was to be hers.

Her indifference chilled his enthusiasm in the plans he was making for her pleasure; and the arrangements were left more and more in the entirely capable hands of the decorator. "We can alter things later,"

he told himself. "And Prudence can buy any new stuff she wants."

The agreeable prospect of shopping with her compensated for the earlier disappointment. It would be so much pleasanter to choose things together.

When she first beheld Morningside Prudence thought it the ugliest house she had ever been in; but later, when better acquainted with its solid splendour, she decided that it had possibilities, and was really a nice house made to look ugly. There was a dingy serviceable effect about everything.

She arrived on a fine evening in April, soft and balmy, following a day of intermittent showers and blazing sunshine. Mr Morgan accompanied her. He had spent the week-end at Wortheton, and made the journey back with her, as had been arranged. His manner during the journey was kindly and attentive. He displayed great consideration for her comfort, and, because she enjoyed fresh air, lowered one window a couple of inches and b.u.t.toned his coat from fear of the draught. The absence of lover-like attentions, which he had sufficient perception to see disturbed her, rea.s.sured Prudence, and placed their relations on an easier footing.

When she arrived at his home and was conducted to the drawing-room to be received by his mother, she was conscious of a new feeling in regard to him; he inspired her with a sense of support. She turned to him instinctively as to some one reliable and familiar; and was grateful to him when he slipped his hand within her arm and kept it there while they advanced together down the long room to where old Mrs Morgan, stout and severe of feature, sat in a big chair, quietly observant of her, scrutinising her in the close disconcerting way peculiar to short-sighted people.

"This is the daughter I promised you, mother," Edward Morgan said.

Mrs Morgan rose slowly and confronted them. She took the girl's outstretched hand.

"What a child!" she said, and bent forward and kissed Prudence on the cheek.

She was, nor did she hide it altogether successfully, a little disappointed. Edward had prepared her for a young daughter-in-law, but she had not expected to see any one quite so youthful in appearance.

Comparing them as they stood side by side, the disparity in age struck her unpleasantly.

"My dear," she said, "I had not realised you were so young."

"I don't think I realised it myself," Prudence returned, feeling her courage oozing away before the hard scrutiny of those critical eyes, "until to-day. I've an unfledged feeling since leaving home. But I'm twenty."

Twenty! And the man who proposed to make her his wife might, had circ.u.mstances so ordained it, have been her father.

"She'll grow up, mother," Mr Morgan observed, and pressed the girl's arm rea.s.suringly. "I must try to equalise matters by growing younger myself."