“You have nothing on your head, my dear,” he said.  “If you want to be in the garden, don’t forget how hot the sun is—­don’t come out without your hat.”

He walked on toward the cottage.

She waited a moment, and looked after him.  She missed the customary flourish of his stick; she saw his little Scotch terrier, who had run out at his heels, barking and capering about him unnoticed.  He was out of spirits:  he was strangely out of spirits.  What did it mean?

CHAPTER X.

ON returning to the house, Magdalen felt her shoulder suddenly touched from behind as she crossed the hall.  She turned and confronted her sister.  Before she could ask any questions, Norah confusedly addressed her, in these words:  “I beg your pardon; I beg you to forgive me.”

Magdalen looked at her sister in astonishment.  All memory, on her side, of the sharp words which had passed between them in the shrubbery was lost in the new interests that now absorbed her; lost as completely as if the angry interview had never taken place.  “Forgive you!” she repeated, amazedly.  “What for?”

“I have heard of your new prospects,” pursued Norah, speaking with a mechanical submissiveness of manner which seemed almost ungracious; “I wished to set things right between us; I wished to say I was sorry for what happened.  Will you forget it?  Will you forget and forgive what happened in the shrubbery?” She tried to proceed; but her inveterate reserve—­or, perhaps, her obstinate reliance on her own opinions—­silenced her at those last words.  Her face clouded over on a sudden.  Before her sister could answer her, she turned away abruptly and ran upstairs.

The door of the library opened, before Magdalen could follow her; and Miss Garth advanced to express the sentiments proper to the occasion.

They were not the mechanically-submissive sentiments which Magdalen had just heard.  Norah had struggled against her rooted distrust of Frank, in deference to the unanswerable decision of both her parents in his favor; and had suppressed the open expression of her antipathy, though the feeling itself remained unconquered.  Miss Garth had made no such concession to the master and mistress of the house.  She had hitherto held the position of a high authority on all domestic questions; and she flatly declined to get off her pedestal in deference to any change in the family circumstances, no matter how amazing or how unexpected that change might be.

“Pray accept my congratulations,” said Miss Garth, bristling all over with implied objections to Frank—­“my congratulations, and my apologies.  When I caught you kissing Mr. Francis Clare in the summer-house, I had no idea you were engaged in carrying out the intentions of your parents.  I offer no opinion on the subject.  I merely regret my own accidental appearance in the character of an Obstacle to the course of true-love—­which appears to run smooth in summer-houses, whatever Shakespeare may say to the contrary.  Consider me for the future, if you please, as an Obstacle removed.  May you be happy!” Miss Garth’s lips closed on that last sentence like a trap, and Miss Garth’s eyes looked ominously prophetic into the matrimonial future.