Page:The Author of Beltraffio, The Middle Years, Greville Fane, and Other Tales (London, Macmillan & Co., 1922).djvu/394

FORDHAM CASTLE herself to acknowledge, was in a manner, and before many days, forced upon her by further important information from her daughter, in the light of the true inevitability of which they had, for that matter, been living. She was there before him with her telegram, which she simply held out to him as from a heart too full for words. "Am engaged to Lord Dunderton, and Sue thinks you can come."

Deep emotion sometimes confounds the mind—and Mrs. Magaw quite flamed with excitement. But on the other hand it sometimes illumines, and she could see, it appeared, what Sue meant. "It's because he's so much in love."

"So far gone that she's safe?" Abel frankly asked.

"So far gone that she's safe."

"Well," he said, "if Sue feels it!" He had so much, he showed, to go by. "Sue knows."

Mrs. Magaw visibly yearned, but she could look at all sides. "I'm bound to say, since you speak of it, that I've an idea Sue has helped. She'll like to have her there."

"Mattie will like to have Sue?"

"No, Sue will like to have Mattie." Elation raised to such a point was in fact already so clarifying that Mrs. Magaw could come all the way. "As Lady Dunderton."

"Well," Abel smiled, "one good turn deserves another!" If he meant it, however, in any such sense as that Mattie might be able in due course to render an equivalent of aid, this notion clearly had to reckon with his companion's sense of its strangeness, exhibited in her now at last upheaved countenance. "Yes," he accordingly insisted, "it will work round to that—you see if it doesn't. If that's where they were to come out, and they have come—by which I mean if Sue has realised it for Mattie and acted as she acts when she does realise, then she can't 374