"Tom, dear," she said, "I have been waiting for you--I knew you would come."

"Of course," he answered; "but what is the matter?"

"I have been ill--very ill, but I'm better. I shall be well, now you have come."

"I thought you were dying," he said, a little resentfully, thinking that he had been hurried away from Margaret for nothing.

"I should have died if you hadn't come," she answered. "Sit down--there," and she signed to a chair close to the sofa.

"Where's Mrs. Lakeman?" he asked, looking round uneasily.

"She has one of her bad attacks of neuralgia. You are glad to come to us?" She turned up her great eyes almost imploringly at him.

"Yes; but I don't understand." He looked out at the glen beneath the windows, and followed the course of the stream with his eyes. "That sort of telegram shouldn't be sent without a good deal of reason."

"But I have been very ill, Tom, dear; and I have wanted you so." She held out her hands; he looked at her uneasily, but he did not take them.

Somehow her manner was different from the one to which he was accustomed, and a misgiving, he did not know of what, rose in his heart. "I felt that no one else could make me well," she added, in a pathetic voice.

"Good! We'll see what can be done. Now, are you going to give me some breakfast?"

"It will be here directly. Tell me about naughty little Margaret. Is her lover with her?"

"Why, of course not; I have just come away."

He didn't like being called a lover. "She and I are engaged; I telegraphed yesterday--"

"Oh, but it was only a little joke, Tom, dear; you wouldn't be so unkind to Mr. Garratt."

"It's all nonsense about Mr. Garratt--" He stopped, for the breakfast was brought in. "Look here; I'd better pour out the coffee," he said; and when he had done so, and given her some toast and b.u.t.tered a scone and helped himself to kidneys and bacon, he felt distinctly better.

"Now, then," he said; "it's all nonsense about Mr. Garratt, and she and I are going to get married--soon as possible."

"No, no, Tom, dear, it's not nonsense," Lena said, with one of her usual wriggles. "She told me all about him, and I saw them meet in the wood, you know."

But he refused even to discuss it.

"That's all nonsense," he repeated, firmly. "What's the matter with Mrs.

Lakeman?"

"It's only neuralgia," Lena said; "you know she has a bad, black day now and then. You don't mind being with me, Tom, dear? We always like being together?" She was beginning to feel that she couldn't hold him; that she had attempted more than she could carry out. She almost wished she had left him to Margaret; her power over him seemed gone, and she was handicapped by her mother's absence.

With a puzzled air he ate his breakfast. "What have you done to yourself?" he asked, when he had finished; "have you caught a cold, or overtired yourself, or just given in and taken to a sofa for no particular reason?"

"I'm not strong," she said, looking up at him; "and I felt as if I couldn't bear the waiting. We expected you every day; why didn't you come?"

"I was with Margaret," he answered, at which Lena turned and buried her face in the cushions and sobbed softly to herself.

"Oh, but I say, what is the matter?" he asked, in dismay; "there's something behind all this; tell me what it means."

"It means that I am going to die," she said. "I must die, I can't live."

She held out her hands to him again, and almost against his will he felt himself going towards her till he had taken them in his. "I want you, dear," she said, and twined her arms round his neck. "I can't let you go to little Margaret. She has Mr. Garratt, remember, and I shall only live a little while. You must stay with me till I die--you will, won't you?"

"This is all nonsense," he said again; and in a kindly, affectionate manner, as a brother might have done, he gave her a kiss for the simple reason that he didn't know what else to do. "You are ill and played out."

"Yes, I'm ill," she said, and wriggled more completely into his arms.

He sincerely wished she wouldn't, but he held her for a few minutes rather awkwardly and then laid her back on the sofa.

"Look here," he said, "I should like to go and unpack and all that, and you ought to rest for a bit."

Of all the days that Tom had ever lived, that was the strangest--that day alone with Lena, who was ill and not ill; with Mrs. Lakeman invisible, he couldn't tell why; and with something at the back of--he couldn't tell what. He wrote out some telegrams before he went up-stairs. When he came down they had gone, and some instinct told him there was a reason for their disappearance; that the answer that came from Margaret later in the day was somewhat juggled, but how or why he didn't know. Lena wriggled and looked in his face and talked in low tones and called him "dear," but she had always done that. She did it to most people, and, though it made him uncomfortable, he couldn't bring himself to attach importance to it; he didn't even like being puzzled by it. Perhaps Mrs. Lakeman would be down to-morrow, he thought, and then things would explain themselves. Meanwhile he comforted himself by writing a long letter to Margaret, and with hoping that the morning would bring him one from her, but when it came there was not a sign.

Then he felt uneasy, and determined that unless there was some good reason to the contrary he would go back to London that night.

x.x.xIV

Mrs. Lakeman appeared as naturally as possible at the Pitlochry breakfast-table the next morning. She looked haggard and ill with her two nights' travel; and now that the excitement of getting Tom away from London, and of the interview with Margaret was over, she asked herself once or twice whether the game had been worth the candle. After all, she thought Tom had only three or four thousand a year, and she didn't believe he would ever do much in politics. It was the dread of losing him that had roused her, the dramatic situation that had interested her, but now that she had created the situation she didn't know what to do with it; she was even a trifle bored. But everything bored her. She was a woman of humor and enterprise rather than of pa.s.sion and sentiment, so that nothing kept a lasting hold upon her when once it had lost its novelty. In some sort of fashion she knew herself to be a sham, always experimenting with effects and make-believe feelings, but, try as she would, she could never drive realities home into her heart. In a sense Lena was like her, always wanting the thing beyond her reach, and experiencing a curious sense of satiety as soon as she possessed it.

Even the presence of Tom after the long interviews of yesterday had lost some of its fascination.

"I don't think I want him," she told her mother, "but I don't want to let him go."

"It's my opinion that I made a fool of myself in going up to London,"

Mrs. Lakeman said. Her energy had flagged, and she wondered at her own nerve in going to Margaret; she scoffed at Dawson Farley and his proposal of marriage; she felt Tom to be in the way at Pitlochry. There were some people staying at Kingussie--she had heard of them from an acquaintance she met on the platform at Euston--she wanted to get over to Pitlochry. They were rich people and full of enterprise; a couple of grown-up sons, too; the elder infinitely better off than Tom Carringford. It was quite possible that he would fall in love with Lena.

The worst of it was that Tom was here; besides, she had set herself a task and had to go through with it. After all, it might afford her some amus.e.m.e.nt, and she was always eager for that; better begin and get it over. She took him into the garden after breakfast to a seat in a secluded corner under a pear-tree; the glen and the rushing, gurgling brook were behind it, and made an accompaniment to their interview.

"Well, what about Margaret Vincent?" she asked him.

"I have had no letter from her. I don't understand it."

"I didn't think there would be one," she answered, significantly, and with an insolence in her manner that put him on the defensive.

"Why didn't you?"

Mrs. Lakeman smiled and said nothing.

"You got my telegram," he inquired--"telling you we were engaged?" Lena had spoken of it two or three times yesterday, but he could hardly believe that so important a communication had been received in the cavalier fashion in which it was apparently treated.

"Of course."

"I can't think what your telegram meant," he said. "Lena isn't dangerously ill, or anything like it."

Then Mrs. Lakeman tried to pump up a little dramatic energy. "Tom Carringford," she said, "do you know that I am the best friend you ever had?"

"I know that you have been awfully good to me."

"Shall I tell you why I telegraphed as I did?"