"I know," said Dawn, a shadow creeping over the happy face. "I could
not." She looked at him with appealing eyes, as if she knew he would
understand.
"I understood," he answered her. "You had been through too heavy a
strain, a shock——" He paused.
She looked puzzled, and wondered how he knew that her marriage was a
shock to her. Was it because his eyes understood her from the first?
Was it a kind of spirit understanding spirit? Dawn was not a
philosopher, but something like this flashed through her thoughts.
"But she told me nothing. Indeed, I did not ask. Perhaps it was my
fault," she added.
"Certainly not," said Charles vehemently. "It was her business to tell
you the plans. I expressly asked her to do so after we had them all
arranged. I asked her to see if they had your approval. I should not
have made any arrangements without it."
"Oh!" Dawn had never had her approval of anything asked in her life.
She could scarcely understand why it should be done. It was very nice,
but how and why did this delightful person seem to have had the
arranging of her plans? It was all a mystery, but she could not ask
about it now before the coach driver. Perhaps the future would unravel
the mystery.
"Just how much did she tell you, any way?" asked Charles, lowering his
voice as much as possible, to make it confidential without actually
putting it beyond the hearing of the driver.
Dawn considered.
"Why, I don’t really think she told me anything," she said at last, half
apologetically, "except how to behave during the ceremony. I think it
was my fault, I really do. She said I ought to go down and talk it over,
but I said I didn’t need to go, that I wanted to be by myself at the
last. I suppose she thought I didn’t care about the arrangements. I
never thought I had anything to do with them, any way. I thought that
was all fixed, like everything else."
There was a sad little droop to the corners of her red lips, which gave
Charles’s heart an unhappy twinge. The driver turned a suspicious eye
toward them, and they sat silent for a while, Charles thinking it over,
and being somehow depressed that she should feel so about their
marriage. To her, of course, it must be somewhat of a forced thing, but
to him it had been all joy until now when he was suddenly brought face
to face with the situation as he thought he saw it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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