Lady's maids -- Fiction; Love stories; Wessex (England) -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
Neither could she go indoors to her solitary room, feeling as she did
in such a state of desperate heaviness. When Springrove was out of sight
she turned back, and arrived at the corner just in time to see him
sit down. Then she glided pensively along the pavement behind him,
forgetting herself to marble like Melancholy herself as she mused in his
neighbourhood unseen. She heard, without heeding, the notes of pianos
and singing voices from the fashionable houses at her back, from the
open windows of which the lamp-light streamed to join that of the
orange-hued full moon, newly risen over the Bay in front. Then Edward
began to pace up and down, and Cytherea, fearing that he would notice
her, hastened homeward, flinging him a last look as she passed out of
sight. No promise from him to write: no request that she herself would
do so--nothing but an indefinite expression of hope in the face of some
fear unknown to her. Alas, alas!
When Owen returned he found she was not in the small sitting-room, and
creeping upstairs into her bedroom with a light, he discovered her there
lying asleep upon the coverlet of the bed, still with her hat and
jacket on. She had flung herself down on entering, and succumbed to
the unwonted oppressiveness that ever attends full-blown love. The wet
traces of tears were yet visible upon her long drooping lashes.
‘Love is a sowre delight, and sugred griefe,
A living death, and ever-dying life.’
‘Cytherea,’ he whispered, kissing her. She awoke with a start, and
vented an exclamation before recovering her judgment. ‘He’s gone!’ she
said.
‘He has told me all,’ said Graye soothingly. ‘He is going off early
to-morrow morning. ‘Twas a shame of him to win you away from me, and
cruel of you to keep the growth of this attachment a secret.’
‘We couldn’t help it,’ she said, and then jumping up--‘Owen, has he told
you _all_?’
‘All of your love from beginning to end,’ he said simply.
Edward then had not told more--as he ought to have done: yet she could
not convict him. But she would struggle against his fetters. She tingled
to the very soles of her feet at the very possibility that he might be
deluding her.
‘Owen,’ she continued, with dignity, ‘what is he to me? Nothing. I must
dismiss such weakness as this--believe me, I will. Something far more
pressing must drive it away. I have been looking my position steadily
in the face, and I must get a living somehow. I mean to advertise once
more.’
‘Advertising is no use.’
‘This one will be.’ He looked surprised at the sanguine tone of her
answer, till she took a piece of paper from the table and showed it him.
‘See what I am going to do,’ she said sadly, almost bitterly. This was
her third effort:--
‘LADY’S-MAID. Inexperienced. Age eighteen.--G., 3 Cross Street,
Budmouth.’
Owen--Owen the respectable--looked blank astonishment. He repeated in a
nameless, varying tone, the two words--
‘Lady’s-maid!’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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