"It will be July when I come back."
"I do not think you ought to go."
"Nor I, if Edward deigns to read the account of Rose's examination."
In that calm smiling resolution Ermine read the needlessness of present
argument, and spoke again of his health and his solitary hours.
"Mitchel has been very kind in coming to sit with me, and we have
indulged in two or three castles in the air--hospitals in the air,
perhaps, I should say. I told him he might bring me down another guest
instead of the tailor, and he has brought a poor young pupil teacher,
whom Tibbie calls a winsome gallant, but I am afraid she won't save him.
Did you ever read the 'Lady of La Garaye'?"
"Not the poem, but I know her story."
"As soon as that parcel comes in, which Villars is always expecting, I
propose to myself to read that poem with you. What's that? It can't be
Rachel as usual."
If it was not Rachel, it was the next thing to her, namely, Alick Keith.
This was the last day of those that he had spent at the Homestead, and
he was leaving Rachel certainly better. She had not fallen back on any
evening that he had been there, but to his great regret he would not be
able to come out the next day. Regimental duty would take him up nearly
all the day, and then he was invited to a party at the Deanery, "which
the mother would never have forgiven me for refusing," he said; just
as if the mother's desires had the very same power over him as over her
daughters. "I came to make a desperate request, Miss Williams," he said.
"Would it be any way possible for you to be so kind as to go up and see
Rachel? She comes downstairs now, and there are no steps if you go in by
the glass doors. Do you think you could manage it?"
"She wishes it!" said Ermine.
"Very much. There are thorns in her mind that no one knows how to deal
with so well as you do, and she told me yesterday how she longed to get
to you."
"It is very good in her. I have sometimes feared she might think we had
dealt unfairly by her if she did not know how very late in the business
we suspected that our impostors were the same," said Ermine.
"It is not her way to blame any one but herself," said Alick, "and, in
fact, our showing her the woodcut deception was a preparation for the
rest of it. But I have said very little to her about all that matter.
She required to be led away rather than back to it. Brooding over it is
fatal work, and yet her spirits are too much weakened and shattered to
bear over-amusement. That is the reason that I thought you would be so
very welcome to-morrow. She has seen no one yet but Lady Temple, and
shrinks from the very idea."