“But I must go,” said Maggie, in a distressed
voice. “I must leave some time to pack.
Don’t press me to stay, dear Lucy.”
Lucy was silent for two or three minutes, looking
away and ruminating. At length she knelt down
by her cousin, and looking up in her face with anxious
seriousness, said,—
“Maggie, is it that you don’t love Philip
well enough to marry him? Tell me—trust
me.”
Maggie held Lucy’s hands tightly in silence
a little while. Her own hands were quite cold.
But when she spoke, her voice was quite clear and
distinct.
“Yes, Lucy, I would choose to marry him.
I think it would be the best and highest lot for me,—to
make his life happy. He loved me first. No
one else could be quite what he is to me. But
I can’t divide myself from my brother for life.
I must go away, and wait. Pray don’t speak
to me again about it.”
Lucy obeyed in pain and wonder. The next word
she said was,—
“Well, dear Maggie, at least you will go to
the dance at Park House to-morrow, and have some music
and brightness, before you go to pay these dull dutiful
visits. Ah! here come aunty and the tea.”
The Spell Seems Broken
The suite of rooms opening into each other at Park
House looked duly brilliant with lights and flowers
and the personal splendors of sixteen couples, with
attendant parents and guardians. The focus of
brilliancy was the long drawing-room, where the dancing
went forward, under the inspiration of the grand piano;
the library, into which it opened at one end, had
the more sober illumination of maturity, with caps
and cards; and at the other end the pretty sitting-room,
with a conservatory attached, was left as an occasional
cool retreat. Lucy, who had laid aside her black
for the first time, and had her pretty slimness set
off by an abundant dress of white crape, was the acknowledged
queen of the occasion; for this was one of the Miss
Guests’ thoroughly condescending parties, including
no member of any aristocracy higher than that of St.
Ogg’s, and stretching to the extreme limits
of commercial and professional gentility.
Maggie at first refused to dance, saying that she
had forgotten all the figures—it was so
many years since she had danced at school; and she
was glad to have that excuse, for it is ill dancing
with a heavy heart. But at length the music wrought
in her young limbs, and the longing came; even though
it was the horrible young Torry, who walked up a second
time to try and persuade her. She warned him that
she could not dance anything but a country-dance;
but he, of course, was willing to wait for that high
felicity, meaning only to be complimentary when he
assured her at several intervals that it was a “great
bore” that she couldn’t waltz, he would
have liked so much to waltz with her. But at
last it was the turn of the good old-fashioned dance
