"Let me try for the opera," he said. "I'm sure it would do you good to go. You will sit in the front drawing-room listening for hansoms all the evening, fancying that every pair of wheels you hear is bringing Angus back to you."
"I would rather be doing that than be sitting at the opera, thinking of him. But I'm afraid there's no chance of his coming to-night. His letter to-day told me that his aunt insists upon his staying two or three days longer, and that she is ill enough to make him anxious to oblige her."
The evening passed in placid dreariness. Mrs. Tregonell sat brooding in her armchair--pondering whether she should or should not tell Christabel everything--knowing but too well how the girl's happiness was dependent upon her undisturbed belief in her lover, yet repeating to herself again and again that it was right and fair that Christabel should know the truth--nay, ever so much better that she should be told it now, when she was still free to shape her own future, than that she should make the discovery later, when she was Angus Hamleigh's wife. This last consideration--the thought, that a secret which was everybody's secret must inevitably, sooner or later, become known to Christabel--weighed heavily with Mrs. Tregonell; and through all her meditations there was interwoven the thought of her absent son, and how his future welfare might depend upon the course to be taken now.
Christabel played and sang, while the Major and Jessie Bridgeman sat at bezique. The friendship of these two had been in no wise disturbed by the Major's offer, and the lady's rejection. It was the habit of both to take life pleasantly. Jessie took pains to show the Major how sincerely she valued his esteem--how completely she appreciated the fine points of his character; and he was too much a gentleman to remind her by one word or tone of his disappointment that day in the wood above Maidenhead.
The evening came to its quiet end at last. Christabel had scarcely left her piano in the dim little third room--she had sat there in the faint light, playing slow sleepy nocturnes and lieder, and musing, musing sadly, with a faint sick dread of coming sorrow. She had seen it in her aunt's face. When the old buhl clock chimed the half-hour after ten the Major got up and took his leave, bending over Mrs. Tregonell as he pressed her hand at parting to murmur: "Remember," with an accent as solemn as Charles the Martyr's when he spoke to Juxon.