Anthony Trollope: The Belton Estate

32. CHAPTER XXXII: CONCLUSION (continued)

'I think we ought to wait at least twelve months,' said Clara, very sadly.

'Poor Will! He will be broken-hearted a dozen times before that. But then, when his happiness does come, he will be all the happier.' Clara, when she heard this, almost hated her cousin Mary not for her own sake, but on Will's account. Will trusted so implicitly to his sister, and yet she could not make a better fight for him than this! It almost seemed that Mary was indifferent to her brother's happiness. Had Will been her brother, Clara thought, and had any girl asked her advice under similar circumstances, she was sure that she would have answered in a different way. She would have told such girl that her first duty was owing to the man who was to be her husband, and would not have said a word to her about the feeling of the world. After all, what did the feeling of the world signify to them, who were going to be all the world to each other?

On that afternoon she went up to Mrs Askerton's; and succeeded in getting advice from her also, though she did not show Will's letter to that lady. 'Of course, I know what he says,' said Mrs Askerton. 'Unless I have mistaken the man, he wants to be married tomorrow.'

'He is not so bad as that,' said Clara.

'Then the next day, or the day after. Of course he is impatient, and does not see any earthly reason why his impatience should not be gratified.'

'He is impatient.'

'And I suppose you hesitate because of your father's death?

'It seems but the other day does it not?' said Clara.

'Everything seems but the other day to me. It was but the other day that I myself was married.'

'And, of course, though I would do anything I could that he would ask me to do'