“Hugh, have you seen her—­Joan?”

He started—­started at the sound of the name that was forever in his thoughts.

“Yes, dear,” he said simply, for why should he lie to this child?

“Oh!” she said.  “Oh, and—­and Hugh, she and you—­” She paused, she held her face down that he might not see it.

“Joan Meredyth,” he said slowly, “and I met in Town a few days ago.  She told me then, that she is engaged to be married.”

“Oh!” Marjorie said, and her heart leaped with a new-born hope.

“And I,” Hugh went on, “am worried and anxious about her.”

“Hugh!”

“I can’t worry you, little girl.  It is nothing in which you could help; it is my fault, my folly!”

“Mine!” she said.

“No, it is mine.  The whole idea was mine; I shoulder the blame of it all.  It has succeeded in what we attempted.  You are all right, you and Tom.  I’ve made a lovely mess of everything else.  But that does not matter so much.  What we wanted, we won, eh?” He smiled at her, little dreaming that she had only won dead-sea fruit.

“Why are you worried and anxious about Joan?”

“I am not going to tell you, dear.  I can’t very well.  Besides, you couldn’t help.  You are happy, you are all right.  Tom is in high favour with her ladyship, so that’s good, and you—­you and Tom are happy, eh?”

“Yes,” she said miserably.

“He’s a good fellow, Marjorie.  Make allowances for him.  He’ll need ’em, he’s no angel; but he means well, and he’s a good clean, honest man, is Tom Arundel, and you’ll be a happy girl when you are his wife; please God!” he added, and put his hand on her shoulder, and did not notice that she was weeping silently.

He drove her back to Cornbridge in the moonlight, and left her at the gates of the Manor House.  “Little girl,” he said, “in this life there’s a good deal of give and take.  Don’t expect too much, and don’t be hurt if you don’t get everything that you ask for.  Remember this—­I—­I cared for you very much.”  “Cared!” she thought.  “Cared?” He spoke in the past—­Cared!”

“But I gave you up because you loved another man; you loved a man more worthy than I am.  I wouldn’t have stood aside if I had felt that the other man was not good enough, that he was a waster and would not make you happy; but I knew Tom better than that.  Stick to him, don’t ask for too much.  Believe always that he loves you, and that he is built of the stuff that keeps straight and true, and so, God bless you, dear!”

He kissed her frankly as a brother might, and sat there watching her up the drive to the house.  He did not guess that when she gained the house she slipped in by a garden door and ran up to her own room to indulge in that relief that a woman may ever find when the grief is not too black and too bitter, the relief of tears.

“I am worried about her,” Hugh thought to himself; but “her” to him meant Joan, not Marjorie.