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“You have been to us a good deal more than a friend of Cecilia’s,” Mrs. Aylmer went on, more gently. “I think you know that. I never expected to have a second daughter at my time of life, and I find I cannot do without one. You are to think it over. You are to talk to your mother, and I shall speak to her myself; and if she says no, you are not to be angry with her, for I should say no myself. But I shall not pretend I do not want you. It is only fair to tell you. I have never wanted anything so much in my life. You have become part of our family. Now,” she continued, “you know us well enough to know that we are not the sort to care a whit about the usual conventions of society, such as expenses. However, I am not so oblivious as not to know we are the exception in that regard. I would expect your mother might have trouble accepting this arrangement, with all your expenses being taken care of by us. So, I put it to you that, to set her mind at ease, but between us, it is only for appearances, I am asking you to accompany me as my companion.”

Margaret opened her mouth. She could not, for a moment, find in the whole of the English language a single word to put into it.

In the drawing-room, across the passage, her mother had begun to hum, softly, a tune that Marianne had used to sing; and outside the window the plane trees stirred in the summer dusk; and on the table at her elbow, beside a tray of stones, lay a little packet of scraps, tied with a bit of black ribbon: lists of books she ought to read, and places she ought to see, that Mr. Tregarth had jotted down for her in the course of the last weeks, in a hand she would have known anywhere. She had not, for some reason, been able to put them in a drawer.

Mrs. Dashwood took the news in the manner that Margaret had expected, which is to say that she took it with perfect composure for exactly three days.

She said nothing at all upon the first evening, when the invitation was laid before her; she listened, with her hands folded, to her daughter’s account, and to Mrs. Aylmer’s, delivered next morning across the breakfast table with the brisk good sense of a general laying out a campaign; and she said only that she would think about it. She thought about it in the drawing-room, and at the window, and in the carriage in Hyde Park, and at three separate rubbers of whist, which she lost. On the third night she sat down at her writing table, and wrote to Delaford; and it was a letter of eleven pages, of which the first ten were the most careful recital of everything she was afraid of, and the last contained only the words: What am I to do?

The answers came within the week.

My dearest Mamma, wrote Marianne, in the great, sprawling, headlong hand which no number of copybooks had ever been able to tame, you ask what I think, and I shall tell you at once, before Elinor has had time to tell me what I ought to. I think she must go. I cannot pretend to any other opinion, and I have tried, because I know it is not the opinion you want. But you once told me, when I was very ill, and very foolish, that it is better to have felt too much than never to have felt at all; and I have thought of it many times since. I think the same may be said of a life. Margaret has been careful of hers for eight-and-ten years and has never yet been careless of it in the smallest particular; she has earned the right, I think, to be a little reckless with it now. Only I beg that she will come back. It seems to me a very large ocean.

Elinor has been reading over my shoulder, the letter went on, and says that I have put it very badly, and that she means to write herself. She has looked out the matter in a book, and finds the crossing takes about five weeks in a good packet, in the summer; she mentions it because she supposes you will wish to be told the worst. I have given up trying to feel calm. But I do know that if she were my daughter, and had asked me, I should not have been able to say no, and I should have hated myself for a month afterwards; and I do not think you will be able to say no either. I think you know it already. I think that is why you have written eleven pages.

Elinor’s letter was shorter, and the first line of it was, Mamma, she will go whatever you say; the only question is whether you will let her go with your love or without it; and I think you have known it since the afternoon she came in with her first piece of flint. The Colonel had added a postscript, of two lines, to the effect that the packet ships to the Continent, and, in their season, the New York packets besides, were, in his experience, well found and ably commanded, and that he had taken the liberty of writing to a friend in the shipping office to ensure that the Aylmers were given the best berths for as much of the journey as could be arranged in advance.

And at the very end of Marianne’s, squeezed sideways into the margin, in a round, laborious, upright hand, that had a large blot upon the last word, was a message which Mrs. Dashwood read aloud to her daughter twice, and the second time was obliged to stop:

Aunt Margaret. You may take the pebble abroad provided it does not get lost or I shall be extremely cross. I have made out a paper about it. Yours truly, Henry. P.S. Aunt Smith says America is full of Americans.

It was in the little back bedroom, that evening, with the candle guttering and the London noises fading in the square, that Mrs. Dashwood came to her youngest daughter, in her nightcap and her old blue shawl, and sat down on the edge of the bed.

She did not begin at once. She looked about her at the room, at the two trunks, half-packed, at the open case of specimens on the washstand, and the coil of stout cord that Margaret had bought that morning against the day, which she was assured would come, when she should have a specimen too large for any box; and she took Margaret’s hand between her own, and turned it over, and looked at it. It was a brown, square, capable hand, with a callus at the base of the thumb, and a small white scar across the knuckle where a hammer had once slipped. It was not in the least like Elinor’s, or Marianne’s; it was, on the whole, a good deal more like her own, at that age, than she would once have thought it possible to admit.

“I have always known that you were the most like your father,” said Mrs. Dashwood, at last. “It has been the greatest comfort of my life, and the greatest terror. When you were quite small, you would go off in the garden at Norland, and one could not find you; and when I found you, you would be sitting at the bottom of the wall with some dreadful worm and would look up at me with the most perfect calm and say, Mamma, it has forty legs. I used to wonder what was to become of a girl who was so entirely happy in such very remote places.”

“I am sorry, Mamma.”

“You are not to be sorry. I am trying to say something, and I am saying it very badly.” She drew a breath. “Do you remember bringing me that paper, when you were sixteen? A Proposed Journey. I read it, and I said it was very well, and that it was a long way off, and I did not for one moment believe that I should ever be asked to make good on it. I have had a great many years, since, to grow fond of believing that. And now here it is, at the door, and I find that being fond of a belief does not make it any easier to give up.” She pressed her daughter’s hand. “I do not say you are not out. I do not say the young men will not wait; I think, upon the whole, that they will manage very well without you, and it does them no harm to learn it. I only say that I do not know how I shall bear the quiet.”

Margaret said nothing. She had her mother’s hand in her own.

“I do not want you to go away from anything in order to go towards something,” said Mrs. Dashwood. “That is the only thing I ask. I do not want you to be running. There is that young man, Mr. Fanshawe, with his flowers, whom I thought — well, I do not know what I thought; and there is Mr. Tregarth, who has taken to coming to the house every day, and who is, I dare say, a very good man, though he has the most alarming coat; and I should not like you to go three thousand miles to avoid either of them, if either of them is what you want.”

“I do not think,” said Margaret slowly, “that I am running, Mamma. I do not think I want either of them. Not yet. I think I like them both a great deal, and I think that it is not the same.” She stopped and tried again. “It is only that I have never yet been sure. I have been sure about Vesuvius, and about Cecilia, and about you; but I have never yet been sure of a person in that way. And I do not think I ought to marry anyone until I am.”

“No,” said Mrs. Dashwood. “I do not think you ought.”

She said it so calmly that Margaret looked up in astonishment; and saw, upon her mother’s face, a tenderness and a resignation that she had never seen there before, and a certain lightening about the eyes, as of a woman who has laid down a very heavy parcel after carrying it a great distance.

“Then you will let me go?”

“I shall let you go,” said Mrs. Dashwood, “as your sisters said. I shall let you go because you have asked me, and because I cannot stop you, and because you are your father’s daughter, and I should not, on the whole, wish you to be otherwise. And you will write. And you will not be a fool about rivers. And you will bring back Henry’s pebble, for I do not intend to go to Delaford and tell that child that it was lost upon some mountain whose name I cannot pronounce.” She bent and kissed her forehead; and for a moment neither of them was quite able to speak. “There is one thing more. I have been a very stupid old woman. But I have seen you laugh at the Aylmers’ table, and I have seen you at Lady Colville’s, and I am not entirely blind, my dear. You have been happier here than I have ever seen you in a drawing-room. I only mean — that if a person were to be waiting, when you come home —”

“Mamma.”

“— I only say that I should not think any the worse of you.”

Chapter X.

It was Mr. Fanshawe who came first to say good-bye, upon a hot bright afternoon three days before the sailing, with a great bunch of hothouse roses in one hand and his hat in the other, and a look on his handsome face that Margaret had not seen before. He found her in the morning-room, alone. He did not seem to know what to do with the roses; he laid them on a table and picked them up again.

“I am told you are going to see the whole of the world,” said Mr. Fanshawe.

“Rather a large part of it. There is Italy first, and Vesuvius; and wherever else the Aylmers wish to show me. I admit, I am hoping for it to include a volcano somewhere along the journey.”

“You are quite mad, you know. It is what I like best in you. I have never in my life been so entertained. I shall not say that I did not think of asking you to give it up, for I did; I lay awake for two nights and composed a very fine speech, which began, Miss Dashwood, I have been in love with you since Lady Colville’s ball. But I have been well brought up. I do not say a thing unless I mean it; and I began to be afraid that I did.”