His pride was wounded. With a yearning that amounted to agony, he watched their receding steps. Follow them he would not. He leaned against the tree by which Miss Sheckleton had left him, and half resolved to quit that melancholy scene of his worst disaster without another look or word--with only the regrets of all a life.
When Miss Sheckleton had reached Margaret, before the young lady spoke, she saw, by her unusual paleness and by something at once of pain and anger in her face, that she had seen Cleve Verney.
"Well, Margaret, if you _will_ go, you _will_; but, before you make it irreparable, you must, at least, think."
"Think of what?" said Margaret, a little disdainfully.
"Think that he has come all this way for nothing but the chance of seeing you; of perhaps saying a few words to set himself right."
"If he wished to speak to me, he might have said so," she answered. "Not that I see any reason to change my mind on that point, or any good that can come, possibly, or for ever, if he could talk and I listen for so long."
"Well, but you can't doubt what he has come for," said Miss Sheckleton.
"I don't doubt, because I don't mean to think about it," said the young lady, looking fiercely up toward the gilded weather vanes that glimmered on the grey pinnacles of the château.
"Yes, but it _is_ not a matter of doubt, or of thinking, but of fact, for he _did_ say so," pleaded Miss Sheckleton.
"I wish we were in Italy, or some out-of-the-way part of Spain," said the handsome girl, in the same vein, and walking still onward; "I always said this was too near England, too much in the current."
"No, dear, it is a quiet place," said good Anne Sheckleton.
"No, cousin Anne, it is the most _un_quiet place in all the world," answered the girl, in a wild, low tone, as she walked on.
"And he wants to speak to you; he entreats a few words, a very few."
"I know you _ought_, my dear; you'll be sorry for it, all your days, Margaret, if you don't," replied Anne Sheckleton.
"Come home, dear, come home, darling," said the girl, peremptorily, but sadly.
"I say, Margaret, if you let him go without speaking to him, you will regret it all your days."
"You have no right to talk this way, cousin Anne; I am unhappy enough as it is. Let us go on," she said.
