table for tea, and sat there waiting, like
the ladies in those houses where he went; like Mrs. Hannay or Mrs.
Ransome who bought her embroidery; or like that grand lady with the
title, who had come with Mrs. Ransome--the lady who had bought more
embroidery than anybody, the scent on whose clothes was enough, Maggie
said, to take your breath away.

Maggie loved her tea-table. She embroidered beautiful linen cloths for
it. Every Friday it was decked as an altar dedicated to the service of a
god--in case he came.

He hadn't come. It was past eight, yet Maggie left the altar standing
with the cloth on it, and waited. It would be terrible if the god should
come and find no altar. Once, even at this late hour, he had come.

The house was very quiet. Mrs. Morse was out marketing, and Maggie was
alone. Friday was market night in Scale. She wondered if he would
remember that, and come. Her heart beat violently with the thought that
he might be beginning to come late. The others had come late when they
began to love her.

She had forgotten them, or only cared to remember such of their ways as
threw light on Mr. Majendie's. For he was, as yet, obscure to her.

It seemed to her that a new thing had come to her, a thing marvellously
and divinely new, this, that she should be waiting, counting hours, and
marking days on calendars, measuring her own pulses with a hand, now on
her heart, now on her throbbing forehead, and wondering what could be the
matter with her. Maggie was six-and-twenty; but ever since she was nine
she had been waiting and wondering. For there always had been somebody
whom Maggie loved insanely. First it was the little boy who lived in the
house opposite, at home. He had abandoned Maggie's society, and broken
her heart on the day when he "went into trousers." Then it was the big
boy in her father's shop who gave her chocolates one day and snubbed her
cruelly the next. Then it was the young man who came to tune the piano
in the back parlour. Then the arithmetic master in the little
boarding-school they sent her to. And then (for Maggie's infatuations
rose rapidly in the social scale) it was one of the young gentlemen who
"studied" at the Vicarage. He was engaged to Maggie for a whole term; and
he went away and jilted her, so that Maggie's heart was broken a second
time. At last, on an evil day for Maggie, it was one of the gentlemen
(not so young) staying up at "the big house." He watched for Maggie in
dark la