Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/587

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CONDUCTED BY ""
 * No. 25..
 * SATURDAY, MAY 22, 1869.
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intention, one of the first which Marian Creswell had expressed after her marriage, and one which had so incensed Gertrude, of converting the girls' music-room into a boudoir, had long since been carried ont. Almost immediately after he had returned from his wedding trip, Mr. Creswell had sent to London for decorators and upholsterers. An army of foreign artists, much given to beard and pantomimical gesture, to humming scraps of operas over their work, and to furtively smoking cigarettes in the shrubberies whenever they could evade the stern eye of the overseer, had arrived upon the scene; and when they returned to town they left the music-room, which had been a bleak, gaunt, cheerless apartment enough, a miracle of brightness and cosiness, elegance and comfort. Everybody was astonished at the change, and the young ladies themselves were compelled to confess that the boudoir, as it then appeared, was perfectly charming, and that really, perhaps, after all, Mrs. Creswell might have been actuated, apart from mere malevolence and spite, by some sense and appreciation of the capabilities of the room in the selection she had made. There was a good deal of actual truth in this judgment; Marian had determined to take the earliest opportunity of asserting herself against the girls and letting them know the superiority of her position; she had also intended, if ever she were able, to gratify the wish to have a room of her own, where she might be absolute mistress, surrounded by her books, pictures, and other belongings; and by the acquisition of the music-room she was able to accomplish both these intentions. Moreover the windows of the music-room looked out towards Helmingham. Half-way towards the dim distance stood the old school-house, where she had been born, where all her childhood had been spent, and where she had been comparatively innocent and unworldly; for though the worship of wealth had probably been innate in her, and had grown with her growth and strengthened with her strength, she had not then sacrificed others to her own avarice, nor forfeited her self-respect for the gratification of her overwhelming passion. In a person differently constituted, the constant contemplation of such views might have had an irritating or a depressing effect, but Marian's strength of mind rendered her independent of any such feeling. She never thought with regret of the step she had taken; she never had the remotest twinge of conscience as to the manner in which she had behaved to Walter Joyce; she was frequently in the habit of passing all the circumstances in review in her mind, and invariably came to the conclusion that she had acted wisely, and that, were she placed in a similar position again, she should do exactly the same. No; she was able to think over all the passages of her first and only love—that love which she had deliberately cast from the pedestal of her heart, and trampled under foot—without an extra pulsation of excitement or regret. She would pass hour after hour in gazing from her window on distant places where, far removed from the chance of intrusion by the prying villagers—who, however, were profoundly ignorant of what was going on—she would have stolen interviews with her lover, listening to his fond words, and experiencing a kind of pleasure such as