Barbara bent her head. She felt that Berwick's low, ardent voice was slowly opening the gates of paradise, and drawing her through into that enchanted garden where every longing of the heart may be safely and innocently satisfied.
The carriage was going slowly down the steep hill leading from Whiteways to Chillingworth, and Berwick knew that he would soon have to leave her. His voice dropped to a lower key--he ventured, for a moment, to take her ringless left hand and hold it tightly: "I ask but little--nothing you do not think it right to give. But your friendship would mean much to me--would protect me from evil impulses of which, thank God, you can know nothing. Even to-night I suffered from misdeeds--to put it plainly, from past sins I should not have been even tempted to commit had I known you when I committed them."
His words--his confession--moved Barbara to the soul. "I am your friend," she spoke with a certain difficulty, and yet with solemnity. She looked up, and he saw that her eyes were full of tears.
The carriage stopped, and they both, or perhaps it was only Berwick, came down again to the everyday world where friendship between a man and a woman is regarded as so dangerous a thing by the prudent.
"Good-night! Thank you for bringing me." He added a word or two as to the carriage and the Priory stables--his coachman was a Chancton man--and then he was gone, leaving Barbara to go on alone, happy, content with life, as she had never thought it possible to be.
James Berwick, making his way quickly up the steep path leading from the wall built round Chillingworth Park to the high plateau on which stood the house, felt less content and very much less happy. Had he not been rather too quixotic in this matter of leaving Barbara to go on her way alone? Why should he not have prolonged those exquisite moments? What harm could it have done had he given himself the pleasure of accompanying his friend to the Priory, and then driving back to Chillingworth by himself? Perhaps there had been something pusillanimous in his fear of idle gossip. Oh! why had he behaved in this matter so much better than there was any occasion to do?
So our good deeds rise up and smite us, and seldom are we allowed the consolation of knowing what alternative action on our part might have brought about.