‘It’s hard on her,’ said the stepmother. ‘You ken an awfu’ deal mair than me, Margret; but you dinna see it’s hard upon her as I do: though I could never forgive her thinking of anything serious, and you so ill. We maun a’ hae our little diversion,’ Jean added, after a pause. ‘It’s but that. It couldna be marrying and giving in marriage the lass was thinking of, and you so far from well.’
‘Would it not be more unkind if it was mere diversion?’ said Margaret.
‘Na,’ said Jean quickly, ‘a lass like a bairn must whiles have the play. We’re a’ the better o’t. And Isabel meant nae mair. She’s thoughtless whiles, but she has a tender heart. You canna believe she was planning out her life and you lying suffering here?’
‘She’s so young,’ said Margaret, though a momentary contraction passed over her face. It was meet that Isabel’s life should be planned out before she was left alone in the world.
Isabel for her part went very slowly to the door, and looked up and down the road, to cheat her own conscience into the belief that she was obeying her sister. She took a few steps round the house in the wrong direction to look for the watcher, and went back to the door with a relieved heart, not having seen him. Her heart was not detached from her first love, but she had been much shaken in her belief in him at their last meeting; and though she denied indignantly that it was ‘diversion,’ she trembled to bring Stapylton to the length of an interview with Margaret, thereby binding him and herself for ever. So Isabel thought in her simplicity. ‘It would be as bad as being married,’ she said to herself; and she had no desire to be married. All that her heart asked could be given by those chance meetings, by the sweet sense of being loved, the charm of the tender secret which was between the two. To go any further at such a moment would have shocked and startled the girl; and what was to be done if she brought him to Margaret, but that the most serious consequences might follow. She was incapable of ‘diverting herself,’ as Jean thought, but yet had no inclination to quicken the pace of life, or rush upon facts. Serious existence looked still distant and far off, and Isabel approached it with tender delay, with soft wistfulness and reluctance. It would come to that eventually, no doubt. But why should Horace, why should Margaret, be so impatient now?