“Very difficult. And if you had found him,
the chances are that he would have set his face against
the child. Marian Nowell will have no need to
supplicate for protection from an indifferent father
or a hard-hearted grandfather, if she will be my wife.
“Heaven grant that she may love you as you deserve
to be loved by her!” Captain Sedgewick answered
heartily.
He thought it would be the best thing that could happen
to his darling to become this young man’s wife,
and he had a notion that a simple, inexperienced girl
could scarcely help responding to the hopes of such
a lover. To his mind Gilbert Fenton seemed eminently
adapted to win a woman’s heart. He forgot
the fatality that belongs to these things, and that
a man may have every good gift, and yet just miss the
magic power to touch one woman’s heart.
Accepted.
Mr. Fenton lingered another week at Lidford, with
imminent peril to the safe conduct of affairs at his
offices in Great St. Helens. He could not tear
himself away just yet. He felt that he must have
some more definite understanding of his position before
he went back to London; and in the meantime he pondered
with a dangerous delight upon that sunny vision of
a suburban villa to which Marian should welcome him
when his day’s work was done.
He went every day to the cottage, and he bore himself
in no manner like a rejected lover. He was indeed
very hopeful as to the issue of his wooing. He
knew that Marian Nowell’s heart was free, that
there was no rival image to be displaced before his
own could reign there, and he thought that it must
go hard with him if he did not win her love.
So Marian saw him every day, and had to listen to
the Captain’s praises of him pretty frequently
during his absence. And Captain Sedgewick’s
talk about Gilbert Fenton generally closed with a
regretful sigh, the meaning of which had grown very
clear to Marian.
She thought about her uncle’s words and looks
and sighs a good deal in the quiet of her own room.
What was there she would not do for the love of that
dearest and noblest of men? Marry a man she disliked?
No, that was a sin from which the girl’s pure
mind would have recoiled instinctively. But she
did like Gilbert Fenton—loved him perhaps—though
she had never confessed as much to herself.
This calm friendship might really be love after all;
not quite such love as she had read of in novels and
poems, where the passion was always rendered desperate
by the opposing influence of adverse circumstances
and unkind kindred; but a tranquil sentiment, a dull,
slow, smouldering fire, that needed only some sudden
wind of jealousy or misfortune to fan it into a flame.
She knew that his society was pleasant to her, that
she would miss him very much when he left Lidford;
and when she tried to fancy him reconciled to her
rejection of him, and returning to London to transfer
his affections to some other woman, the thought was
very obnoxious to her. He had not flattered her,
he had been in no way slavish in his attentions to
her; but he had surrounded her with a kind of atmosphere
of love and admiration, the charm of which no girl
thus beloved for the first time in her life could
be quite proof against.
