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Updated: May 23, 2025
She beckoned him quickly into the room. He hastened to the bedside, where, after gazing sadly at the all but unconscious Miss Nippett, he knelt to take the woman's wan, worn hand in his. To Mavis's surprise, Miss Nippett's fingers at once closed on those of Mr Poulter.
Mavis sighed as she finished the letter; she then became lost in troubled thought, during which she was uncertain whether to laugh for joy or sorrow. She laughed for joy, perhaps because her mind, as once before when similarly confronted, had chosen the easier way of self-preservation, an instinct specially insistent in one of Mavis's years.
It's going to burst." Mrs Trivett held the girl's burning head firmly in her hands. "Tighter! tighter!" cried Mavis. "Oh, deary, deary! Why isn't your husband here to comfort you?" sobbed Mrs Trivett. Mavis's face hardened. She repressed an inclination to laugh. Then she became immersed in a stupor of despair.
But scruples of the nature which she had displayed were assuredly numbered amongst the virtues, and to arrive at the conclusion that evil had arisen from the practice of virtue was unthinkable. Such a sorry sequence could not be; God would not permit it. Mavis's head ached. Life to her seemed an inexplicable tangle, from which one fact stood out with insistent prominence.
She only wished she could have run away from The Warren and gone straight home and poured out her troubles to her mother. The Glyn Williams had cut Bevis in the old days and poured scorn on the Ramsays for knowing him, and it seemed too bad that their present hospitality to him should still be a subject for blame. Mavis's pride kept her at the piano all the rest of the evening.
And then the silent coming of a great gleaming motor-car, the showers of rice, the showering chorus of gay good wishes and good-bys, and then they shot away in the night for some mysterious bourne of the honeymoon. And behind them the dance went on till dawn. The paper dropped in Mavis's lap, and Martha Hawn sighed and rose to get ready for bed. "My, but some folks is lucky!"
Not the faintest surprise showed in Mavis's face, little as she knew what his purpose was, for what the master did was right; but the old woman and the old man were stunned into silence and neither could smile. "Have you got yo' license?" the old man asked gravely. "Whut's a license?" "You got to git a license from the county clerk afore you can git married, an' hit costs two dollars."
Within a few hours all was quickly, quietly done, and that night Jason started with his mother and the body of Mavis's father back to the hills. The railroad had almost reached the county-seat now, and at the end of it old Jason Hawn and Mavis were waiting in the misty dawn with two saddled horses and a spring wagon. The four met with a handshake, a grave "how-dye," and no further speech.
Miss Meakin had been summoned to one of the partner's rooms to say what she knew of the subject, and had sat near a table on which was lying Mavis's letter; she had made a note of the address, to write to her directly she was able to do so. "We must have a long talk, dear; but not to-night." "Why not to-night?" "Mr Napper, my 'boy, will be waiting for me outside."
And, as that night long ago in the mountains, Gray and Marjorie floated like feathers past them, and over Gray's shoulder the girl's eyes caught Jason's fixed on her, and Mavis's fixed on Gray; so on the next round she stopped a moment near them. "I'm going to teach you to dance, Jason," she said, as though she were tossing a gauntlet to somebody, "and Gray can teach Mavis."
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