Yet not much had come of
it. If the worst came to the worst, the lawyer had offered the boy a
place in his office; Anthony Babington had proposed his coming to
Dethick if his father turned him out; while Robin himself inclined to a
third alternative--the begging of his father to give him a sum of money
and be rid of him; after which he proposed, with youthful vagueness, to
set off for London and see what he could do there.
Marjorie, however, had seemed strangely uninterested in such proposals.
She had listened with patience, bowing her head in assent to each,
beginning once or twice a word of criticism, and stopping herself before
she had well begun. But she had looked at Robin with more than interest;
and her mother had found her more than once on her knees in her own
chamber, in tears. Yet she had said nothing, except that she would speak
her mind after Easter, perhaps.
And now, it seemed, she was doing it.
* * * * *
"You have had no other thought?" she said again, "besides those of which
you talked with my father?"
They were walking together through the woods, half a mile along the
Hathersage valley. Beneath them the ground fell steeply away, above them
it rose as steeply to the right. Underfoot the new life of spring was
bourgeoning in mould and grass and undergrowth; for the heather did not
come down so far as this; and the daffodils and celandine and wild
hyacinth lay in carpets of yellow and blue, infinitely sweet, beneath
the shadow of the trees and in the open sunshine.
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