The thoughts of the two who loved her were with Betty that night. The aunt, shaken, jolted, enduring much in the Paris, Lyons and Mediterranean express thought fondly of her.
"She's a nice little thing. I must take her about a bit," she mused, and even encouraged her fancy to play with the idea of a London season--a thing it had not done for years.
The Reverend Cecil, curtains drawn and lamp alight, paused to think of her even in the midst of his first thorough examination of his newest treasure in Seventeenth Century Tracts, "The Man Mouse baited and trapped for nibbling the margins of Eugenius Philalethes, being an assault on Henry Moore." It was bound up with, "The Second Wash, or the Moore scoured again," and a dozen others. A dumpy octavo, in brown leather, he had found it propping a beer barrel in the next village.
"Dear Lizzie!--I wonder if she will ever care for really important things. There must be treasures upon treasures in those boxes on the French quays that one reads about. But she never would learn to know one type from another."
He studied the fire thoughtfully.
"I wonder if she does understand how much she is to me," he thought. "Those are the things that are better unsaid. At least I always think so when she's here. But all these months--I wonder whether girls like you to say things, or to leave them to be understood. It is more delicate not to say them, perhaps."
Then his thoughts went back to the other Lizzie, about whom he had never felt these doubts. He had loved her, and had told her so. And she had told him her half of the story in very simple words--and most simply, and without at all "leaving things to be understood" they had planned the future that never was to be. He remembered the day when sitting over the drawing-room fire, and holding her dear hand he had said: "This is how we shall sit when we are old and gray, dearest." It had seemed so impossibly far-off then.
And she had said: "I hope we shall die the same day, Cec."
But this had not happened.
And he had said: "And we shall have such a beautiful life--doing good, and working for God, and bringing up our children in the right way. Oh, Lizzie, it's very wonderful to think of that happiness, isn't it?"
And she had laid her head on his shoulder and whispered: "I hope we shall have a little girl, dear."