Greatheart

"You are sure?" Dinah insisted. "You are really not ill?"

Isabel's smile had in it--had she but known it--a gleam of the Divine. "My dearest, all is well with me," she said. "I lay down for a little to please Scott. But I am going to get up now. Where have you been since dèjeuner? I missed you."

Dinah clung closer, hiding her face.

Instantly Isabel's arms tightened. The passionate tenderness of them thrilled her through and through. "Why, child, what has happened?" she whispered. "Tell me! Tell me!"

But Dinah only hid her face a little deeper. "I don't know how," she murmured.

There fell a silence. Then, under her breath, Isabel spoke. "My darling, whisper--just whisper! Who--is it?"

And very, very faintly, at last Dinah made answer. "It--it is--Sir Eustace."

There fell another silence, longer, deeper, than the first. Then Isabel uttered a short, hard sigh, and, stooping, kissed the bowed, curly head. "God bless and keep you always, dearest!" she said.

Something in the words--or was it the tone?--pierced Dinah. She turned her face slightly upwards. "I--I was afraid you wouldn't be pleased," she faltered. "Do--do forgive me--if you can!"

"Forgive you!" All the wealth of Isabel's love was in the words. "Why, darling, I have been wanting you for my own little sister ever since I first saw you."

"Oh, have you?" Eagerly Dinah lifted her head. Her eyes were shining, her cheeks very flushed. "Then you are pleased?" she said earnestly. "You really are pleased?"

Isabel smiled at her very sadly, very fondly. "My darling, if you are happy, I am more than pleased," she said.

Yet Dinah was puzzled, not wholly satisfied. She received Isabel's kiss with a certain wistfulness. "I feel--somehow--as if I've done wrong," she said. "Yet--yet--Scott--" she halted over the name, uttering it shyly--"said he was--awfully pleased."

"Ah! You have told Scott!" There was a sharp, almost a wrung, sound in Isabel's voice; but the next moment she controlled it, and spoke with steady resolution. "Then, my dear, you needn't have any misgivings. If you love Eustace and he loves you, it is the best thing possible for you both." She held Dinah to her again and kissed her; then very tenderly released her. "You must run and get ready, dear child. It is getting late."

Dinah went obediently, still with that bewildered feeling of having somehow taken a wrong turning. She was convinced in her own mind that the news had not been welcome to Isabel, disguise it how she would. And suddenly through her mind there ran the memory of those words she had uttered a few weeks before. "Never prefer the tinsel to the true gold!" She had not fully understood their meaning then. Now very vividly it flashed upon her. Isabel had compared her two brothers in that brief sentence. Isabel's estimate of the one was as low as that of the other was high. Isabel did not love Eustace--the handsome, debonair brother who had once been all the world to her.