Friday was the day which Maggie Forrest marked in her calendar sometimes with a query and sometimes with a cross.  The query stood for “Will he come?” The cross meant “He came.”  To-night there was no cross, though Maggie had brushed her hair till it shone again, and put on her best dress, and laid out her little table for tea, and sat there waiting, like the ladies in those houses where he went; like Mrs. Hannay or Mrs. Ransome who bought her embroidery; or like that grand lady with the title, who had come with Mrs. Ransome—­the lady who had bought more embroidery than anybody, the scent on whose clothes was enough, Maggie said, to take your breath away.

Maggie loved her tea-table.  She embroidered beautiful linen cloths for it.  Every Friday it was decked as an altar dedicated to the service of a god—­in case he came.

He hadn’t come.  It was past eight, yet Maggie left the altar standing with the cloth on it, and waited.  It would be terrible if the god should come and find no altar.  Once, even at this late hour, he had come.

The house was very quiet.  Mrs. Morse was out marketing, and Maggie was alone.  Friday was market night in Scale.  She wondered if he would remember that, and come.  Her heart beat violently with the thought that he might be beginning to come late.  The others had come late when they began to love her.

She had forgotten them, or only cared to remember such of their ways as threw light on Mr. Majendie’s.  For he was, as yet, obscure to her.

It seemed to her that a new thing had come to her, a thing marvellously and divinely new, this, that she should be waiting, counting hours, and marking days on calendars, measuring her own pulses with a hand, now on her heart, now on her throbbing forehead, and wondering what could be the matter with her.  Maggie was six-and-twenty; but ever since she was nine she had been waiting and wondering.  For there always had been somebody whom Maggie loved insanely.  First it was the little boy who lived in the house opposite, at home.  He had abandoned Maggie’s society, and broken her heart on the day when he “went into trousers.”  Then it was the big boy in her father’s shop who gave her chocolates one day and snubbed her cruelly the next.  Then it was the young man who came to tune the piano in the back parlour.  Then the arithmetic master in the little boarding-school they sent her to.  And then (for Maggie’s infatuations rose rapidly in the social scale) it was one of the young gentlemen who “studied” at the Vicarage.  He was engaged to Maggie for a whole term; and he went away and jilted her, so that Maggie’s heart was broken a second time.  At last, on an evil day for Maggie, it was one of the gentlemen (not so young) staying up at “the big house.”  He watched for Maggie in dark lanes, and followed her through the fields at evening, till one evening he made her turn and follow her heart and him.  And so Maggie went on her predestined way.