The Marriage of Elinor. Oliphant Margaret

if I found that out, afterwards; but to be given the choice beforehand, never! After all, you don't half know me, John."

      "Perhaps not," he said, gravely. They had left the garden behind in its blaze of flowers, and strayed off into the subdued twilight of the copse, where everything was in a half tone of greenness and shadow and waning light. "There are always new lights arising on a many-sided creature like you – and that makes one think. Do you know you are not at all the person to take a great disappointment quietly, if that should happen to come to you in your life?"

      "A great disappointment?" she said, looking up at him with a wondering glance. Then he thought the colour paled a little in her face. "No," she said, "I don't suppose I should take it quietly. Who does?"

      "Oh, many people – people with less determination and more patience than you. You are not very patient by nature, Elinor."

      "I never said I was."

      "And though no one would give up more generously, as a voluntary matter, you could not bear being made a nonentity of, or put in a secondary place."

      "I should not like it, I suppose."

      "You would give everything, flinging it away; but to have all your sacrifices taken for granted, your tastes made of no account – "

      There was no doubt now that she had grown pale. "May I ask what all these investigations into my character mean? I never was so anatomized before."

      "It was only to say that you are not a good subject for this kind of experiment, Elinor. I don't see you putting up with things, making the best of everything, submitting to have your sense of right and wrong outraged perhaps. Some women would not be much disturbed by that. They would put off the responsibility and feel it their duty to accept whatever was put before them. But you – it would be a different matter with you."

      "I should hope so, if I was ever exposed to such dangers. But now may I know what you are driving at, John, for you have some meaning in what you say!"

      He took her hand and drew it through his arm. He was in more moved than he wished to show. "Only this, Elinor," – he said.

      "Oh, John, will you never call me Nelly any more?"

      "Only this, Nelly, my little Nelly, never mine again – and that never was mine, except in my silly thought. Only this: that if you have the least doubt, the smallest flutter of an uncertainty, just enough to make you hold your breath for a moment, oh, my dear girl, stop! Don't go on with it; pause until you can make sure."

      "John!" she forced her arm from his with an indignant movement. "Oh, how do you dare to say it?" she said. "Doubt of Mr. Compton! Uncertainty about Phil!" She laughed out, and the echo seemed to ring into all the recesses of the trees. "I would be much more ready to doubt myself," she said.

      "Doubt yourself; that is what I mean. Think if you are not deceiving yourself. I don't think you are so very sure as you believe you are, Nelly. You don't feel so certain – "

      "Do you know that you are insulting me, John? You say as much as that I am a fool carried away by a momentary enthusiasm, with no real love, no true feeling in me, tempted, perhaps, as Mrs. Hudson thinks, by the Honourable!" Her lip quivered, and the fading colour came back in a rush to her face. "It is hard enough to have a woman like that think it, who ought to know better, who has always known me – but you, John!"

      "You may be sure, Elinor, that I did not put it on that ground."

      "No, perhaps: but on ground not much more respectful to me – perhaps that I have been fascinated by a handsome man, which is not considered derogatory. Oh, John, a girl does not give herself away on an argument like that. I may be hasty and self-willed and impatient, as you say; but when you – love!" Her face flushed like a rose, so that even in the grey of the evening it shone out like one of the clouds full of sunset that still lingered on the sky. A few quick tears followed, the natural consequence of her emotion. And then she turned to him with the ineffable condescension of one farther advanced in life stooping sweetly to his ignorance. "You have not yet come to the moment in your experience when you can understand that, dear John."

      Oh, the insight and the ignorance, the knowledge and the absence of all perception! He, too, laughed out, as she had done, with a sense of the intolerable ridicule and folly and mistake. "Perhaps that's how it is," he said.

      Elinor looked at him gravely, in an elder-sisterly, profoundly-investigating way, and then she took his arm quietly and turned towards home. "I shall forget what you have said, and you will forget that you ever said it; and now we will go home, John, and be just the same dear friends as before."

      "Will you promise me," he said, "that whatever happens, without pride, or recollection of what I've been so foolish as to say, in any need or emergency, or whenever you want anything, or if you should be in trouble – trouble comes to everybody in this life – you will remember what you have said just now, and send for your cousin John?"

      Her whole face beamed out in one smile, she clasped her other hand round his arm; "I should have done it without being asked, without ever doubting for a moment, because it was the most natural thing in the world. Whom should I turn to else if not to my dear old – But call me Nelly, John."

      "Dear little Nelly!" he said with faltering voice, "then that is a bargain."

      She held up her cheek to him, and he kissed it solemnly in the shadow of the little young oak that fluttered its leaves wistfully in the breeze that was getting up – and then very soberly, saying little, they walked back to the cottage. He was going abroad for his vacation, not saying to himself even that he preferred not to be present at the wedding, but resigning himself to the necessity, for it was not to be till the middle of September, and it would be breaking up his holiday had he to come back at that time. So this little interview was a leave-taking as well as a solemn engagement for all the risks and dangers of life. The pain in it, after that very sharp moment in the copse, was softened down into a sadness not unsweet, as they came silently together from out of the shadow into the quiet hemisphere of sky and space, which was over the little centre of the cottage with its human glimmer of fire and lights. The sky was unusually clear, and among those soft, rose-tinted clouds of the sunset, which were no clouds at all, had risen a young crescent of a moon, just about to disappear, too, in the short course of one of her earliest nights. They lingered for a moment before they went indoors. The depth of the combe was filled with the growing darkness, but the ridges above were still light and softly edged with the silver of the moon, and the distant road, like a long, white line, came conspicuously into sight, winding for a little way along the hill-top unsheltered, before it plunged into the shadow of the trees – the road that led into the world, by which they should both depart presently to stray into such different ways.

      CHAPTER VI

      The drawing-room after dinner always looked cheerful. Perhaps the fact that it was a sort of little oasis in the desert, and that the light from those windows shone into three counties, made the interior more cosy and bright. (There are houses now upon every knoll, and the wind cannot blow on Windyhill for the quantity of obstructions it meets with.) There was the usual log burning on the hearth, and the party in general kept away from it, for the night was warm. Only Mr. Sharp, the London lawyer, was equal to bearing the heat. He stood with his back to it, and his long legs showing against the glow behind, a sharp-nosed, long man in black, who had immediately suggested Mephistopheles to Elinor, even though he was on the Compton side. He had taken his coffee after dinner, and now he stood over the fire slowly sipping a cup of tea. There was a look of acquisitiveness about him which suggested an inclination to appropriate anything from the unnecessary heat of the fire to the equally unnecessary tea. But Mr. Sharp had been on the winning side. He had demonstrated the superior sense of making the money – which was not large enough sum to settle – of real use to the young pair by an investment which would increase Mr. Compton's importance in his company, besides producing very good dividends – much better dividends than would be possible if it were treated in the old-fashioned way by trustees. This was how the bride wished it, which was the most telling of arguments: and surely, to insure good interest and an increase of capital to her, through her husband's hands, was better than to secure some beggarly hundred and fifty pounds a year for her portion, though without any risks at all.

      Mr.