Then her thoughts turned, would turn, could not be kept from turning, to John Gordon. He had been to her the personification of manliness. That which he resolved to do, he did with an iron will. But his manners to all women were soft, and to her seemed to have been suffused with special tenderness. But he was chary of his words,--as he had even been to her. He had been the son of a banker at Norwich; but, just as she had become acquainted with him, the bank had broke, and he had left Oxford to come home and find himself a ruined man. But he had never said a word to her of the family misfortune. He had been six feet high, with dark hair cut very short, somewhat full of sport of the roughest kind, which, however, he had abandoned instantly. "Things have so turned out," he had once said to Mary, "that I must earn something to eat instead of riding after foxes." She could not boast that he was handsome. "What does it signify?" she had once said to her step-mother, who had declared him to be stiff, upsetting, and ugly. "A man is not like a poor girl, who has nothing but the softness of her skin to depend upon." Then Mrs Lawrie had declared to him that "he did no good coming about the house,"--and he went away.
Why had he not spoken to her? He had said that one word, promising that if he returned he would come to Norwich. She had lived three years since that, and he had not come back. And her house had been broken up, and she, though she would have been prepared to wait for another three years,--though she would have waited till she had grown grey with waiting,--she had now fallen into the hands of one who had a right to demand from her that she should obey him. "And it is not that I hate him," she said to herself. "I do love him. He is all good. But I am glad that he has not bade me not to think of John Gordon."
It seemed to her, as she sat there at the window, that she ought to tell Mrs Baggett what had occurred. There had been that between them which, as she thought, made it incumbent on her to let Mrs Baggett know the result of her interview with Mr Whittlestaff. So she went down-stairs, and found that invaluable old domestic interfering materially with the comfort of the two younger maidens. She was determined to let them "know what was what," as she expressed it.