She was very happy when she fell asleep, and thought of her dear father lying under her roof, still as near to her as he had ever been. But when she awoke in the night, after realising with some pleasurable emotion that he was there, and not going to sleep again immediately, the doubts began to creep in.
Might not these delightfully high spirits, which she had attributed to his joy in being with her again, and his pleasure in the thought of Beatrix's child coming--might they not have sprung from another source altogether? Ella was coming over to lunch that day, and they were to lunch with her on Sunday. If she was becoming, or had already become, the beloved object, that exhilaration which had made him seem as young as either of them throughout the evening past would be sufficiently accounted for. She knew from her own experience, and from memories of Beatrix, how the joy of loving and being loved effervesces in sparkling merriment, and sheds itself over those who are loved already. It saddened her a little to think that her father's whole-hearted acceptance of Maurice, which had so charmed her that evening, might after all only mean that she herself was no longer of paramount importance to him. His pleasure in their society would remain, but it would not call forth of itself that demonstration of happiness. It would not be they who had caused the years to fall off him.
She could come to no conclusion, except that if he were in the early stage of discovery that he might still love and be loved, it would affect him to just that insurgence of youthful spirit that he had shown throughout the evening.
He was less hilarious in manner the next morning, but still cheerfully content at being where he was. All three of them went down to the Abbey and looked for early flowers in the rock-garden. Then Maurice went off to his work, and he and Caroline went to see the Prescotts, and after that he wrote a long letter to Beatrix while she busied herself with preparations for luncheon.
Ella came, and there was a revival of the high spirits; but all of them shared in it. There was nothing that there had not been scores of times before, when she had been with them and they had all made merry together. Nothing to indicate either in him or in her that the affectionate terms they had always been on now hid something deeper. The affection on either side expressed itself plainly enough, and to an outsider would certainly have seemed to indicate an unusual attraction; but it was what they had gradually come to. She had been given the affection of the family, his no less than theirs, and returned it.