“You do not think of her.”

Vernon looked at his companion.

CHAPTER XIX

COLONEL DE CRAYE AND CLARA MIDDLETON

Miss Middleton finished her stroll with Crossjay by winding her trailer of ivy in a wreath round his hat and sticking her bunch of grasses in the wreath.  She then commanded him to sit on the ground beside a big rhododendron, there to await her return.  Crossjay had informed her of a design he entertained to be off with a horde of boys nesting in high trees, and marking spots where wasps and hornets were to be attacked in Autumn:  she thought it a dangerous business, and as the boy’s dinner-bell had very little restraint over him when he was in the flush of a scheme of this description, she wished to make tolerably sure of him through the charm she not unreadily believed she could fling on lads of his age.  “Promise me you will not move from here until I come back, and when I come I will give you a kiss.”  Crossjay promised.  She left him and forgot him.

Seeing by her watch fifteen minutes to the ringing of the bell, a sudden resolve that she would speak to her father without another minute’s delay had prompted her like a superstitious impulse to abandon her aimless course and be direct.  She knew what was good for her; she knew it now more clearly than in the morning.  To be taken away instantly! was her cry.  There could be no further doubt.  Had there been any before?  But she would not in the morning have suspected herself of a capacity for evil, and of a pressing need to be saved from herself.  She was not pure of nature:  it may be that we breed saintly souls which are:  she was pure of will:  fire rather than ice.  And in beginning to see the elements she was made of she did not shuffle them to a heap with her sweet looks to front her.  She put to her account some strength, much weakness; she almost dared to gaze unblinking at a perilous evil tendency.  The glimpse of it drove her to her father.

“He must take me away at once; to-morrow!”

She wished to spare her father.  So unsparing of herself was she, that, in her hesitation to speak to him of her change of feeling for Sir Willoughby, she would not suffer it to be attributed in her own mind to a daughter’s anxious consideration about her father’s loneliness; an idea she had indulged formerly.  Acknowledging that it was imperative she should speak, she understood that she had refrained, even to the inflicting upon herself of such humiliation as to run dilating on her woes to others, because of the silliest of human desires to preserve her reputation for consistency.  She had heard women abused for shallowness and flightiness:  she had heard her father denounce them as veering weather-vanes, and his oft-repeated quid femina possit:  for her sex’s sake, and also to appear an exception to her sex, this reasoning creature desired to be thought consistent.