“I hope she may always remain so,” Lady Lansdowne answered slily.
“I’ve no doubt she will,” Sir Robert replied with fond assurance, his eye on the Honourable Bob, who was approaching the bridge from the lawns.
Lady Lansdowne followed the look with her eyes and smiled. But she said nothing. She turned to Mary, who was now near at hand, and reading in the girl’s looks plain traces of trouble, and agitation, she contented herself with sending for Lady Louisa, and asking that her carriage might be called. In this way she cloaked under a little bustle the girl’s embarrassment as she came up to them and joined them. Five minutes later Lady Lansdowne was gone.
After that, Mary would have had only too much food for thought, had her mother alone filled her mind; had those kisses which had so stirred her being, those clinging arms, and that face which bore the deep imprint of illness, alone burdened her memory. Years afterwards the beat of the music which played in the gardens that evening, while the party within sat at dinner, haunted her; bringing back, as such things will, the scene and her aching heart, the outward glitter and the inward care, the Honourable Bob’s gallantries and her father’s stately figure as he rose and drank wine with her; ay, and the hip, hip, hurrah which shook the glasses when an old Squire, a privileged person, rose, before she could leave, and toasted her.
Burdened only with the sacred memories of the afternoon, and the anxiety, the pity, the love which they engendered, she had been far from happy, far from free. But in truth, with all her feeling for her mother, Mary bore about with her a keener and more bitter regret. The dull pain which had troubled her of late when thoughts of Arthur Vaughan would beset her was grown to a pang of shame, almost intolerable. She had told herself a hundred times before this that it was her weakness, her fear of her father, her mean compliance that had led her to give him up—rather than any real belief in his baseness. For she had never, she was sure now, believed in that baseness. But now, now when her mother, whose word it never struck her to doubt, had affirmed his innocence, now that she knew, now since a phrase of that mother’s had brought to her mind every incident of the never-to-be-forgotten coach-drive, the May morning, the sunshine and the budding trees, the birth of love—pain gnawed at her heart. She was sick with misery.