The conversation was interrupted by Miss Colza, who came and stood opposite to them.

“Well, I’m sure,” she said; “you two are very confidential.”

“And why shouldn’t we be confidential, Miss Colza?” asked Mr Rubb.

“Oh, dear! no reason in life, if you both like it.”

Miss Mackenzie was not sure that she did like it. But again she was not sure that she did not, when Mr Rubb pressed her hand at parting, and told her that her great kindness had been of the most material service to the firm. “He felt it,” he said, “if nobody else did.” That also might be a sacrificial duty and therefore gratifying.

The next morning she and Susanna left Gower Street at eight, spent an interesting period of nearly an hour at the railway station, and reached Littlebath in safety at one.

Chapter IX.
Miss Mackenzie’s Philosophy

Miss Mackenzie remained quiet in her room for two days after her return before she went out to see anybody. These last Christmas weeks had certainly been the most eventful period of her life, and there was very much of which it was necessary that she should think. She had, she thought, made up her mind to refuse her cousin’s offer; but the deed was not yet done. She had to think of the mode in which she must do it; and she could not but remember, also, that she might still change her mind in that matter if she pleased. The anger produced in her by Lady Ball’s claim, as it were, to her fortune, had almost evaporated; but the memory of her cousin’s story of his troubles was still fresh. “I have a hard time of it sometimes, I can tell you.” Those words and others of the same kind were the arguments which had moved her, and made her try to think that she could love him. Then she remembered his bald head and the weary, careworn look about his eyes, and his little intermittent talk, addressed chiefly to his mother, about the money-market,—little speeches made as he would sit with the newspaper in his hand:

“The Confederate loan isn’t so bad, after all. I wish I’d taken a few.”

“You know you’d never have slept if you had,” Lady Ball would answer.

All this Miss Mackenzie now turned in her mind, and asked herself whether she could be happy in hearing such speeches for the remainder of her life.

“It is not as if you two were young people, and wanted to be billing and cooing,” Lady Ball had said to her the same evening.

Miss Mackenzie, as she thought of this, was not so sure that Lady Ball was right. Why should she not want billing and cooing as well as another? It was natural that a woman should want some of it in her life, and she had had none of it yet. She had had a lover, certainly, but there had been no billing and cooing with him. Nothing of that kind had been possible in her brother Walter’s house.