The glow of the winter fires reddened the windows of Furze Farm as the shadow of the house loomed up through the mist. The orchard hedge was dripping with dew, the grass gray and sodden, the beech-trees like phantom trees, the coming of the dusk mournful and full of a heavy silence. Yet the windows of the house, with their lozenged latticing outlined by the fire, sent John Gore’s thoughts back with a sudden shiver of pity to dreary, ruinous, fog-choked Thorn. He dismounted heavily, and leading his horse to the stable left him to Mr. Jennifer, who was sitting astride a rough bench mending harness by the light of a candle.
In the kitchen Barbara came out to welcome him, with just the faintest glimmer of shyness that made her love the more desirable. Mrs. Winnie was above, turning out her linen cupboard, little Will in the wood-lodge cutting firewood with the hand-bill—a thing he had been solemnly forbidden to do. Barbara and John had both kitchen and parlor to themselves. No candles had been lit in the house as yet, but the burning logs threw a rich light upon the wainscoting.
He hung his cloak on a chair and took her hands, her pale face with its new ripeness of color seeming to bring to him freshness and perfume after these abhorrent hours at Thorn. Yet his heart was stern and troubled in him because of the man, his father; nor could even his love’s eyes flash a complete smile into his.
“They will be pleased with this fog at sea,” he said. “I can fancy that I hear the bells ringing. What have you been doing all day, little woman?”
She looked at him with questioning intentness. Rarely can a man hide care from the world—very rarely, indeed, from the eyes of the woman who loves him.
“Mrs. Winnie has been teaching me to make button-holes, John. Will and I went out after dinner, and were nearly lost in the fog. You look tired.”
He had dropped her hands, but he caught them again with the impulsive frankness of a man who knows himself to be but a poor dissembler.
“I am tired, Barbe—heart-tired; I cannot pretend that I am not.”
“This morning I went out innocently enough, child; but I have returned with more than I foreshadowed.”
She hung back a little from him, reading the forethought and trouble in his eyes, and the tired yet generous calm of a man thinking of others rather than himself.