"He was very kind," she answered--the color came to her face; "he said I oughtn't to be in London alone." "Quite right!" and Tom thought that she was a nice girl not to betray her elderly lover; a proposal was a thing that every woman should regard as confidential--unless she accepted it, of course. XXVI Another week and the whole world had changed. Margaret forgot Hannah and Woodside Farm; sometimes she even forgot her longing to see her mother's face again. She was blind to the people in the street, to everything about her; her ambition to be an actress was lulled into pleasant abeyance. A great happiness dawned in her heart--she did not try to put a name to it; she did not even know it to be there; but the whole world seemed to be full of it, and in the world there was just one person--Tom Carringford. He came to her every day; in some sort of fashion he constituted himself her guardian, though they preserved the happy playfellow terms of boy and girl. They made all manner of innocent expeditions together--to Battersea Park, where they rowed about in a boat on the lake, and then drove back to dine in Margaret's little sitting-room (a simple dinner that Mrs. Gilman arranged); to Richmond, where they dined by an open window and drove back again before it was dark, for Tom, with all his exuberance, had an occasional uneasy sense of conventionality, though he said nothing about it to Margaret. "I don't want to put her up to things; she is much too nice as she is," he thought. They went to Chiswick and Kew; they talked about Pope at Twickenham and walked along the tow-path; to Bushey and Hampton Court, and had tea--by an open window again--at the old-fashioned inn, and returned in the cool of the evening. One day they went to the Zoo, where they laughed at the animals and fed the monkeys, and again had tea, and ate so many cucumber sandwiches that they were ashamed to count them--for it was a proof of their youth and unsophistication that they generally made eating a part of their entertainment when they went out together. They lived only for each other, yet neither stopped to realize it, till at the end of ten days Tom was roused to a sense of what was happening by a letter from Mrs. Lakeman. Lena was very ill indeed, she said, and had been waiting day after day for Tom; why hadn't he come? She had heard from Sir George Stringer that the Vincent girl was in town--was Tom aware of it? Probably she was too much taken up with the young grocer from Guildford to have made a sign to him? This was an unwise remark for so tactful a woman as Mrs. Lakeman, for it made Tom snort indignantly, and it brought home to him the difficulties of Margaret's position. Just as he was starting to meet her after the rehearsal that afternoon a telegram arrived: "Come immediately; Lena dangerously ill."