Farquhar is to bring him up before
him on his horse."
"You'll go with us, won't you, dear Jemima?" asked Elizabeth: "it
will be at----"
"No! I can't go," said Jemima abruptly. "Don't ask me--I can't."
The little girls were hushed into silence by her manner; for
whatever she might be to those above her in age and position, to
those below her Jemima was almost invariably gentle She felt that
they were wondering at her.
"Go upstairs and take off your things. You know papa does not
like you to come into this room in the shoes in which you have
been out."
She was glad to out her sisters short in the details which they
were so mercilessly inflicting--details which she must harden
herself to, before she could hear them quietly and unmoved. She
saw that she had lost her place as the first object in Mr.
Farquhar's eyes--a position she had hardly cared for while she
was secure in the enjoyment of it; but the charm of it now was
redoubled, in her acute sense of how she had forfeited it by her
own doing, and her own fault. For if he were the cold,
calculating man her father had believed him to be, and had
represented him as being to her, would he care for a portionless
widow in humble circumstances like Mrs. Denbigh--no money, no
connection, encumbered with her boy? The very action which proved
Mr. Farquhar to be lost to Jemima reinstated him on his throne in
her fancy. And she must go on in hushed quietness, quivering with
every fresh token of his preference for another? That other, too,
one so infinitely more worthy of him than herself; so that she
could not have even the poor comfort of thinking that he had no
discrimination, and was throwing himself away on a common or
worthless person.
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