PART 2
28. CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
(continued)
"You must get yourself out of the scrape as you can. I'm too
used up to `exert' myself for anyone. It's like a man to propose
a bone and vulgar bread and cheese for company. I won't have anything
of the sort in my house. Take that Scott up to Mother's, and
tell him I'm away, sick, dead, anything. I won't see him, and you
two can laugh at me and my jelly as much as you like. You won't
have anything else here." And having delivered her defiance all
on one breath, Meg cast away her pinafore and precipitately left the
field to bemoan herself in her own room.
What those two creatures did in her absence, she never knew,
but Mr. scott was not taken `up to Mother's', and when Meg descended,
after they had strolled away together, she found traces of a promiscuous
lunch which filled her with horror. Lotty reported that they had eaten
"a much, and greatly laughed, and the master bid her throw away all
the sweet stuff, and hide the pots."
Meg longed to go and tell Mother, but a sense of shame at her own
short comings, of loyalty to John, "who might be cruel, but nobody
should know it," restrained her, and after a summary cleaning up,
she dressed herself prettily, and sat down to wait for John to
come and be forgiven.
Unfortunately, John didn't come, not seeing the matter in that
light. He had carried it off as a good joke with Scott, excused his
little wife as well as he could, and played the host so hospitably
that his friend enjoyed the impromptu dinner, and promised to come
again, but John was angry, though he did not show it, he felt that
Meg had deserted him in his hour of need. "It wasn't fair to tell
a man to bring folks home any time, with perfect freedom, and when
he took you at your word, to flame up and blame him, and leave him
in the lurch, to be laughed at or pitied. No, by George, it wasn't!
And Meg must know it."
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