The Argosy — page 369: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

345 In the Primrose Time. that would lead her direct to Redwoods and the primrose dell. Straight as the crow flies, through brake and briar, she made her way till she stood at the foot of the tall beech tree. In the cavity at its roots lay another letter. A tiny, fancifully-folded, tinted and scented note. She took it with a shiver of excitement, hid it in her dress, and made for home. It was clutched in her hand when she woke next morning after a few brief hours of sleep, and she anxiously strained her wits to decipher it. It was not possible for her to have entirely understood it, or fathomed the depths of heartless folly to which inordinate vanity can drive a woman of Lady March’s type. She had jilted Philip Reynholt coolly and calculatingly for her wealthy old admirer, yet she grudged the loss of a lover. It was easy to guess what her reply to poor Phil’s appeal would have been had she received it. As it was, she was evidently indignant at his not meeting her, or writing, and she wrote with just enough acerbity to pique and just enough tender sweetness to entice him into further folly. She ended by imperatively demanding that he should meet her there, at 7 o'clock on Sunday evening—and she put it so that it would have been difficult to refuse. Nansie’s eyes were angry as she hid it away before her mother came to call her. She went through the usual routine—Sunday school—the lengthy Easter Day service—dinner—and Sunday school again, in her old mechanical fashion. Her mother had made her a white dress for the day ; and as she coiled up Nansie’s yellow hair and pinned a cluster of primroses at her throat, she secretly rejoiced at her daughter’s fairness and the contrast she made to the bouncing, blooming village girls with their over-smart dress and hoyden manners, or the prim, dowdy young ladies from the vicarage. ‘She is like a lily amongst them,” thought the good woman. She did her part in the singing carefully and well, but the music sounded lifeless and tuneless to her, and Philip’s ring weighed on her breast like a circlet of red-hot iron. She could see the Broadmeads pew, where Sir Francis sat huddled up in a great fur coat, his sharp, spiteful eyes ever on the watch, and Lady March, beautiful and devout, kept her long lashes bent steadfastly on her book, except for one brief expressive second when they flashed forth a signal to the seat in the chancel where Philip sat beside his old father. Nansie saw it all. She was becoming painfully alive to the hints and suggestions that were floating in the air about her. Self-consciousness was dawning in the girl. She began to wonder at herself—at this Nansie, her whole soul in a tumult of wrath and agony of suspense— and at the other Nansie who curtsied to the Vicar and stood up with the little ones to say her catechism and forgot half of it. Would the day ever be done and the clock strike seven? She was bound to go to church, and meanwhile what might be happening? Gomicbooks