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“I am not crying.”

“No,” said Mrs. Aylmer, from her chair, with the dry precision of a woman recording an observation for the Transactions, “you are doing something a great deal wetter than crying, and calling it by another name — stiff-upper-lip reticence — which I have always thought a very English habit.” But she rose as she said it, and came and kissed Margaret’s cheek, which was not at all her usual way of doing things, and stayed a moment longer than the kiss required.

“May I hold her?”

“You may hold her for the whole of the afternoon, if you can bear the responsibility,” said Cecilia, and transferred the small furious bundle into Margaret’s arms with the particular care of a person handing over something newly discovered to be the most valuable object in the world. Meg, upon the transfer, opened one eye, considered the new arrangement with evident suspicion, and, finding nothing immediately to object to, went back to sleep.

“There,” said Thomas Wren, quietly, from his place on the arm of the sofa. He had said very little, in the way of men newly become fathers, who generally find that the occasion has used up a great deal more of their composure than they had budgeted for; but he said this now, watching Margaret with the child in her arms, with a warmth that took in the whole room. “I think she approves of you, Miss Dashwood. She is a person of very decided opinions already and does not give her approval lightly. You are only the second person she has failed to cry at.”

“Who was the first?”

“Her grandfather,” said Cecilia, “which I consider a very poor compliment to the rest of us, as he sang to her for a full hour on Thursday night, entirely out of tune, and I am persuaded it was only exhaustion that kept her quiet and not admiration.”

“It was admiration,” said the Professor, with dignity. “I have an excellent voice. It has been remarked upon in three countries.”

“It has been remarked upon, Papa,” said Cecilia, “but not, I think, in the way you suppose.”

There was a general laugh, of the easy, well-worn kind that belongs to families who have made the same jokes at one another for a great many years and have not yet tired of them; and it was in the comfortable lull that followed it that Margaret, still with the small warm weight of her namesake against her shoulder, asked the question that had been forming, unspoken, since she came up the stairs.

“And what is to become of you all now? You will not go back to Egypt — surely you will not take her to Egypt.”

“We have discussed it,” said Mrs. Aylmer, with the gravity of a general reporting the outcome of a long campaign, “at very great length, and upon several occasions, and I will tell you what we have decided, though I warn you it will not surprise you in the least. We are staying in London.”

“For good?”

“For good, or as near it as anything is, at our age. The Professor has been offered rooms at the Museum, to catalogue what he pleases and lecture when he is asked, which will keep him thoroughly out from underfoot; and I have discovered, to my very great astonishment, that I do not in the least mind a hedge, provided there is a perambulator to be pushed along the other side of it.” She looked down at her granddaughter with an expression that sat oddly, and rather beautifully, on a face that had once directed the excavation of a Sicilian tomb without turning a hair. “We have had a great many adventures, the Professor and I. We have seen the Pyramids by moonlight, and been shipwrecked once, very briefly, off Sicily, and dug up a king who had been buried three thousand years and was not best pleased to be disturbed. But I will tell you a secret, Margaret, since you are nearly one of the family and may as well know it now as later.” She reached across, and touched one finger, very lightly, to the small, clenched fist that had worked its way free of the shawl. “I do not think any of it is going to signify half so much, in the end, as this. We mean to spoil her thoroughly, and ruin her manners, and undo the whole of her mother’s good work; and I have every intention of calling it our very best adventure yet.”

“The very best,” Professor Aylmer agreed, with the ready enthusiasm of a man who has found, quite unexpectedly, a subject that outranks even his beloved potsherds, and does not resent it in the least. “Better than Thebes. I never thought to say it, but there it is.”

Cecilia caught Margaret’s eye above the baby’s head, and something passed between them that was older than either marriage or motherhood, and needed no further words; and Margaret, looking down at the small cross sleeping face of the child who carried her own name into a future she would never entirely stop being amazed by, thought that of all the places she had seen in her wandering life — the volcano, and the temple, and the great falls thundering upstream — she had never once been so glad, nor so undeservedly honoured, to arrive anywhere as she was to have arrived, on this particular Tuesday, in this particular small warm room in Portman Square.

Chapter XXII.

The invitation to Lady Ardleigh’s ball had been on the chimney-piece in Brook Street for a fortnight, and it was on the evening of the twenty-eighth, some six hours before the carriages were ordered, that Colonel Brandon, coming into his wife’s dressing-room without knocking, which was not at all his habit, said quietly that he thought it might be as well if they sent an excuse.

Marianne was seated in front of her glass, with her maid behind her, in the act of having her hair put up. She did not turn round. She looked at her husband in the mirror; and it was noticeable that the hand which held a small silver pin, and which had been perfectly steady, became, upon the instant, steadier still.

“You have heard that they are to be there.”

“Lord Ardleigh mentioned it at the club. Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby have accepted. It is a very large affair, and I should not suppose that you need be within thirty feet of them all evening; but I did think —” He stopped. “I think I should prefer that you were not put to the trial. I can very easily say that you have a headache.”

“I have never had a headache in my life.”

“Then it will be a novelty for Lady Ardleigh.”

She laughed, in spite of herself; and turned round upon the stool, and looked at him directly, with her hands folded in her lap. She was, at that moment, a fine sight. She had not yet put on the gown, and her dark hair was half down upon her shoulders, and she wore a loose white wrapper, and looked, for a moment, like a girl; but the face that she turned upon her husband was the face of a woman who has made up her mind.

“Brandon,” said she. “You are the kindest man in England. I love you for asking. But I will not be driven from a ballroom.”

“I am not asking you to be driven.”

“You are asking me to be spared; and it is very much the same thing. I have been spared for twelve years. I have arranged my whole life so as to be spared, though I did not know it; I have never once gone to a house where I might meet him; I have never once been to Somersetshire. I am sick of it. I have not done anything to be ashamed of, and I am thirty years old, and I have a husband and two children, and I count Henry first; and if Mr. Willoughby should choose to come into a room in which I am, then he may do so, and I shall behave to him as I would to any person who had done me an injury and I no longer minded.” She drew a breath. “I shall not make a scene. You know I shall not. I have been practising for a week.”

The Colonel looked at her for a long moment. Then he crossed the room, took her hand, and held it to his lips.

“Very well,” said he, gravely. “Then I shall come with you. And if I find that I have forgotten myself —”

“You will not.”