London (England) -- Fiction; Theater -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
She nodded, appeared to be considering.
"There is this," she said. "If I married you I would do my best to try
and be a lady—not vulgar. I think, after a little, it would come
easy.... You said we should be perfect friends; but suppose—suppose I
couldn’t help loving you?"
"I was asking myself if that would come about—hoping it. In my case it
is an eventuality not very remote."
His very quietness impressed her. She knew he was not demonstrative,
yet behind every word he spoke the intensity of his feelings was
manifest to her. She had to fight hard to keep in check the ferment of
emotion he had stirred in her. She picked up her hat from the chair
where she had been sitting on it.
"It might have been more crushed," she said quaintly, but with a meaning
that had a hint of tragedy averted in it. She went to a mirror and
began arranging her tumbled hair. "I must go back to Lexie. I stole
out while she was asleep. Perhaps I shall get there before she wakes
up."
"I’ll take you," he said. "Only—aren’t you going to give me an answer
first, Maggy?"
She made a last desperate and unsuccessful effort at calmness.
"Yes—but I’m not worth having," she sobbed and collapsed in a crumpled
heap at his feet. "Don’t stop me!" she gasped, waving him away. "Let
me—_burst_!"
And Chalfont stood where he was, waiting while her pent-up feelings
exhausted themselves in a flood of choking tears, until she should be
ready for him. Presently her sobs ceased. She struggled to her knees;
her hands were clasped; her face, with a faint presage of happiness upon
it, was turned to the window where the dawn of a new morning glimmered.
Her lips moved. She was murmuring something beneath her breath. "What
are you saying, dear?" he asked gently. "I—I think I’m saying my
prayers," she answered huskily.
There, on her knees, with her hair still hanging in disorder, the tears
drying on her face, thanksgiving and humility in her heart, she repeated
the words of her rhymed creed, with a reverence that surely gave it the
consecration of a prayer.
"All’s well with the world, my friend,
And there isn’t an ache that lasts;
All troubles will have an end,
And the rain and the bitter blasts.
There is sleep when the evil is done,
There’s substance beneath the foam;
And the bully old yellow sun will shine
Till the cows come home!"
She held out her arms to Chalfont.
"Lift me up," she whispered.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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