The Guinea Stamp Part 52

Next afternoon Gladys herself drove the lawyer and his wife from Bourhill to the station.

'Now, my dear,' said Mrs. Fordyce, as they were about to part, 'I shall allow the girls to come down on Sat.u.r.day, on condition that you return with them at the end of a week, prepared to accompany us to London.'

Gladys nodded, with a bright smile.

'Yes, I shall do everything you wish. I believe I am rather tired of having my own way, and I should not mind having a change, even from Bourhill.'

As they stood lingering a little over their good-byes, a train from Glasgow came puffing into the station, and, with a sudden gleam of expectation, Mrs. Fordyce glanced anxiously at the alighting pa.s.sengers.

'My dear, why, there is George! actually George himself.'

Gladys cast a startled glance in the direction indicated and the colour mounted high to her brow, then faded quite, leaving her rather strikingly pale.

'Why does he come here?' she asked quickly, 'I have not asked him.'

'Unless you have broken off your engagement with him, Gladys, he has a right to come whether you ask him or not. Tom dear, here is our train now, and we must run over that bridge. We dare not miss it, I suppose?'

'I daren't, seeing I have to take the chair at a dinner in the Windsor Hotel to-night,' replied the lawyer; 'but if you like to remain a little longer, why not, Isabel?'

Mrs. Fordyce hesitated a moment. Her nephew was giving up his ticket to the collector at the little gate, and their train was impatiently snorting at the opposite platform.

'I had better go,' she decided quickly, as her husband began to run off.

Turning to Gladys, she gave her a hasty kiss, and observed seriously,--

'Be kind to poor George, Gladys; he is very fond of you, and you can make anything of him you like. Write to me, like a dear, this evening, after he is away.'

She would have liked a word in her nephew's private ear also, but time forbade it. She waved her hand to him from the steps of the bridge, but he was so occupied looking at Gladys that he did not return her salutation.

Gladys stepped composedly into the phaeton, and, sitting up in rather a dignified way, accorded him a very calm, cool greeting. His demeanour was significant of a slight nervousness as he approached the carriage, not at all sure of his ground.

'I am in luck, Gladys,' he said, trying to speak with a natural gaiety.

'Have I your permission to take a seat beside you?'

'If you are going to Bourhill, of course you may,' she replied quite calmly; then, turning to the groom, she said, without any hesitation, 'You can walk home, William. Put my letters in at the post as you pa.s.s, and bring me five shillings' worth of stamps.'

The groom touched his hat, took the money and the letters, and walked off, indulging in a grin when his face was turned away from the occupants of the carriage.

'Shall I take the reins, Gladys?' inquired George, with a very bright look on his face. He perceived that, though there might be 'rows,' as he mentally expressed it, they would be of a mild nature, easily explained; the bolt had _not_ fallen, if anything was to be gathered from her demeanour.

'No, thank you. I dislike sitting idle in a carriage. I always drive myself,' she said calmly, and, with a rather tighter hand than usual on the reins, she turned the ponies' heads, and even gave each a sharp flick with the whip, which sent them up the leafy road at a very smart pace.

'I have come to make my peace, Gladys, and it's awfully good of you to send the fellow away,' George began impressively. 'I'm in luck, I tell you. I pictured to myself a long dusty walk through the sunshine.'

'I sent him away because we had a long drive this morning, and I wanted Castor and Pollux to have an easier load to pull up the hill,' she replied. 'I suppose if I had allowed you to walk instead of William, it would have been rather rude.'

Her manner, though very calm and unruffled, was rather unpromising.

George looked at her a trifle anxiously, as if hardly sure how to proceed.

'Are you awfully angry with me, Gladys? I always expected a letter from you. I thought you were so angry with me that I was afraid to write.'

'You were quite wrong, then. I was not angry at all. But why should I have written when you did not?'

This was rather unanswerable, and he hesitated a moment over his next words. He had to weigh them rather carefully for the ears of this singularly placid and self-possessed young lady, whose demeanour was so little index to her state of mind.

'Well, if I admit I was in the wrong all the time, though I really, upon my word, don't know very well what the row was about, will you forgive me?' he asked in his most irresistible manner, which was so far successful that the first approach to a smile he had seen since they met now appeared on her lips.

'You know very well what it was all about; you have not forgotten a word that pa.s.sed, any more than I have,' she answered. 'But you ought to have written all the same. I am generous enough to admit, however, that you had more reason on your side than I was induced to admit that night. The experiment I tried has not been a success. Have you heard that Lizzie Hepburn has run away from us?'

He swallowed the choking sensation in his throat, and answered, with what indifference he could command,--

'Yes, I heard it.'

'And is that why you have come?' she asked, with a keen, curious glance at him,--'to crow over my downfall That is not generous in the least.'

'My darling, how can you think me capable of such meanness? Would it not be more charitable to think I came to condole and sympathise with you?'

'It would, of course,' she admitted, with a sigh; 'but I am rather suspicious of everybody. I am afraid I am not at all in a wholesome frame of mind.'

She looked so lovely as she uttered these words, her sweet face wearing a somewhat pensive, troubled look, that her lover felt that nothing would ever induce him to give her up. They had now left the town behind, and were on the brow of the hill where four roads meet. To the right stood the cosy homestead of Mossgiel, and to the left the whole expanse of lovely country, hill and field and wood, which had so often filled the soul of Burns with the lonely rapture of the poet's soul.

Gladys never pa.s.sed up that way without thinking of him, and it seemed to her sometimes that she shared with him that deep, yearning depression of soul which found a voice in the words--

'Man was made to mourn.'

The road was quite deserted. Its gra.s.sy slopes were white with the gowan, and in the low ragged hedges there were clumps of sweet-smelling hawthorn. All the fields were green and lovely with the promise which summer crowns and autumn reaps; and it was all so lovely a world that there seemed in it no room for care or sadness or any dismal thing.

Being thus alone, with no witness to their happiness but the birds and the bees, the pair of lovers ought to have found it a golden hour; but something appeared still to stand between them, like a gaunt shadow keeping them apart.

'I have been awfully miserable, Gladys. You see, I didn't know what to do; you are so different from any girl I have ever met. I never know exactly what will please you and what will aggravate you. Upon my word, you have no idea what an amount of power you have in those frail little hands.'

Gladys smiled and coloured a little. She was not quite insensible to flattery; she was young enough to feel that it was rather pleasant, on the whole, to have so much power over a big handsome fellow like George Fordyce.

'I wish you would not talk so much nonsense,' she said quickly; but her tone was more encouraging, and with a sudden inspiration George followed up his advantage. He put his arm round the slender waist, to the great amazement of Castor and Pollux, who, finding the firm hand relax on the reins, had no sort of hesitation about coming to an immediate stop.

'But, all the same, I'm going to keep hold of these little hands,' he said pa.s.sionately, 'because they hold my happiness in their grasp, and I'm not going to allow them to torture me very much longer. How soon can you be ready to marry me, Gladys?'

'To marry you! Oh, not for ages. Let me go. Just look at the ponies!

They are utterly scandalised,' she cried, her sweet face suffused with red. But he did not release her until he had stolen a kiss from her unwilling lips, a kiss which seemed to him to bridge entirely the slight estrangement which had been between them.

She sat very far away from him, and, gathering up the reins again, brought Castor and Pollux to their scattered senses; but her face was not quite so grim and unreadable as before. After all, it was something to be of so much importance to one man. The very idea of her power over him had something intoxicating in it, thus proving her to be a very woman.

'I am going to London very soon with your Aunt Isabel and the girls,'

she said, trying to lead the conversation into more commonplace grooves.

'And couldn't you see about your trousseau when you are there? Isn't London the place to get such things?' he asked. But Gladys calmly ignored this speech.

'I have engaged Christina Balfour to remain at least all summer at Bourhill. She can be useful to Miss Peck in many ways, and she is devoted to the place. Poor Lizzie has fearfully disappointed me. What would you advise me to do about her?'

'Nothing. There is nothing you can possibly do now but leave her alone,'