Hearing the door close, Sydney looked round. She and Kitty were alone again; and Kitty was putting away her books without showing any pleasure at the prospect of a holiday.
Sydney took the child fondly in her arms. “Would you be very sorry,” she asked, “if I was obliged to go away, some day, and leave you?” Kitty turned pale with terror at the dreadful prospect which those words presented. “There! there! I am only joking,” Sydney said, shocked at the effect which her attempt to suggest the impending separation had produced. “You shall come with me, darling; we will walk in the park together.”
Kitty’s face brightened directly. She proposed extending their walk to the paddock, and feeding the cows. Sydney readily consented. Any amusement was welcome to her which diverted the child’s attention from herself.
They had been nearly an hour in the park, and were returning to the house through a clump of trees, when Sydney’s companion, running on before her, cried: “Here’s papa!” Her first impulse was to draw back behind a tree, in the hope of escaping notice. Linley sent Kitty away to gather a nosegay of daisies, and joined Sydney under the trees.
“I have been looking for you everywhere,” he said. “My wife--”
Sydney interrupted him. “Discovered!” she exclaimed.
“There is nothing that need alarm you,” he replied. “Catherine is too good and too true herself to suspect others easily. She sees a change in you that she doesn’t understand--she asks if I have noticed it--and that is all. But her mother has the cunning of the devil. There is a serious reason for controlling yourself.”
He spoke so earnestly that he startled her. “Are you angry with me?” she asked.
“Angry! Does the man live who could be angry with you?”
“It might be better for both of us if you _were_ angry with me. I have to control myself; I will try again. Oh, if you only knew what I suffer when Mrs. Linley is kind to me!”
He persisted in trying to rouse her to a sense of the danger that threatened them, while the visitors remained in the house. “In a few days, Sydney, there will be no more need for the deceit that is now forced on us. Till that time comes, remember--Mrs. Presty suspects us.”
Kitty ran back to them with her hands full of daisies before they could say more.