It was a Lover and His Lass by Mrs. Oliphant - HTML preview

POSTSCRIPT.

(Which is scarcely necessary.)

Inside the lighted windows which threw so cheerful a gleam upon the soft darkness of the night outside, Margaret and Jean were seated, with their heads very close together, bending over a letter. They were reading it both together, with great agitation and excitement. The faces of both were flushed and eager; there was a controversy going on between them. Nothing more peaceful than this interior, the little fire burning brightly, the lamp on the table, the wainscot reflecting the leap and sparkle of the burning wood, but nothing more agitated than the little group, the faces so like each other, so close together, lighted up with all the fire and passion of civil war.

"She is beginning to forget him," Margaret said. "I will send him his answer to-night, and she need never know. Why should the little thing be disturbed again? She has had a terrible year, but it is all over, all over now."

"All over now he has come. In no other way will it ever be over."

"Oh! hold your peace with your romance, Jean. It was always sore, sore against my will to entertain the thought of him—and now that she has got over it——"

"She will never get over it," said Miss Jean. "Oh, Margaret, have ye no mercy in you? Will you let her heart break just for a prejudice, just for——"

"Do you call it a prejudice that the man should be a gentleman, that his father before him should have been a gentleman?——"

"I care nothing for his father before him," exclaimed Jean, with the energy of passion. "He is as true a gentleman as ever stepped. I call it just a prejudice——"

"Hold your peace, Jean. Break her heart! when I tell you she is mending, mending day by day. Her peace shall not be disturbed again. I will write to him that it is too late. He is gentleman enough for that, I allow; that he will go away, that he will do nothing disloyal to me——"

"Would you have him disloyal to her?" Miss Jean cried. "No, Margaret! I have done your bidding many a day, but I will not now. If you write and bid him go, I will write and bid him stay. He will judge for himself which of us knows best."

Margaret rose to her feet with an indignant gesture.

"Will you defy me—me, your own sister?" she said.

"Oh! Margaret, do not break my heart!—but I will defy all the world for Lilias," cried Miss Jean. "She is more than my sister, she is my bairn; and yours too—and yours too!"

"It is for that," cried Margaret, with something like a sob, "that I will just defend her to the death."

"Is it defending her?" cried the other, "to break her heart?"

"There is no question of breaking hearts," said Margaret, hurriedly controlling herself, and taking up the letter; "but, Jean, for God's sake, not a word, for here is Lilias at the door."

Neither of them remembered, in the excitement of the moment, that the sight of them standing up to receive her, with the traces of their struggle in their looks, must have shown Lilias, had there been no other indication, that something extraordinary had happened. But that mattered little, as the reader knows. Lilias came in smiling, her eyes dazzled with the lights, her fair locks jewelled with the dews. She kept Lewis behind her with her hand.

"I have brought somebody to see you, Margaret and Jean," she said.

Margaret let the letter fall from her hand. It was the final throwing down of her arms before triumphant Love and Fate.

THE END.