“We can just catch the tips of the Scotch firs,
Maggie, from this seat,” said Philip.
They had taken each other’s hands in silence,
but Maggie had looked at him with a more complete
revival of the old childlike affectionate smile than
he had seen before, and he felt encouraged.
“Yes,” she said, “I often look at
them, and wish I could see the low sunlight on the
stems again. But I have never been that way but
once,—to the churchyard with my mother.”
“I have been there, I go there, continually,”
said Philip. “I have nothing but the past
to live upon.”
A keen remembrance and keen pity impelled Maggie to
put her hand in Philip’s. They had so often
walked hand in hand!
“I remember all the spots,” she said,—“just
where you told me of particular things, beautiful
stories that I had never heard of before.”
“You will go there again soon, won’t you,
Maggie?” said Philip, getting timid. “The
Mill will soon be your brother’s home again.”
“Yes; but I shall not be there,” said
Maggie. “I shall only hear of that happiness.
I am going away again; Lucy has not told you, perhaps?”
“Then the future will never join on to the past
again, Maggie? That book is quite closed?”
The gray eyes that had so often looked up at her with
entreating worship, looked up at her now, with a last
struggling ray of hope in them, and Maggie met them
with her large sincere gaze.
“That book never will be closed, Philip,”
she said, with grave sadness; “I desire no future
that will break the ties of the past. But the
tie to my brother is one of the strongest. I can
do nothing willingly that will divide me always from
him.”
“Is that the only reason that would keep us
apart forever, Maggie?” said Philip, with a
desperate determination to have a definite answer.
“The only reason,” said Maggie, with calm
decision. And she believed it. At that moment
she felt as if the enchanted cup had been dashed to
the ground. The reactionary excitement that gave
her a proud self-mastery had not subsided, and she
looked at the future with a sense of calm choice.
They sat hand in hand without looking at each other
or speaking for a few minutes; in Maggie’s mind
the first scenes of love and parting were more present
than the actual moment, and she was looking at Philip
in the Red Deeps.
Philip felt that he ought to have been thoroughly
happy in that answer of hers; she was as open and
transparent as a rock-pool. Why was he not thoroughly
happy? Jealousy is never satisfied with anything
short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest
fold of the heart.
In the Lane
Maggie had been four days at her aunt Moss’s
giving the early June sunshine quite a new brightness
in the care-dimmed eyes of that affectionate woman,
and making an epoch for her cousins great and small,
who were learning her words and actions by heart, as
if she had been a transient avatar of perfect wisdom
and beauty.
