‘But besides,’ continued Edward, ‘a married man to do what would cause a young girl to write a note of the kind you mention!’
‘That I don’t know anything about,’ she stammered. ‘But Cytherea didn’t, of course, dream any more than I did, or others in the parish, that he was married.’
‘And I have reason to believe that he told her of the fact directly afterwards, that she might not compromise herself, or allow him to. It is notorious that he struggled honestly and hard against her attractions, and succeeded in hiding his feelings, if not in quenching them.’
‘Very greatly changed,’ he murmured abstractedly.
‘You must remember,’ she added more suasively, ‘that Miss Graye has a perfect right to do what she likes with her own--her heart, that is to say.’
Her descent from irritation was caused by perceiving that Edward’s faith was really disturbed by her strong assertions, and it gratified her.
Edward’s thoughts flew to his father, and the object of his interview with her. Tongue-fencing was utterly distasteful to him.
‘I will not trouble you by remaining longer, madam,’ he remarked, gloomily; ‘our conversation has ended sadly for me.’
‘Don’t think so,’ she said, ‘and don’t be mistaken. I am older than you are, many years older, and I know many things.’
Full of miserable doubt, and bitterly regretting that he had raised his father’s expectations by anticipations impossible of fulfilment, Edward slowly went his way into the village, and approached his cousin’s house. The farmer was at the door looking eagerly for him. He had been waiting there for more than half-an-hour. His eye kindled quickly.
‘Well, Ted, what does she say?’ he asked, in the intensely sanguine tones which fall sadly upon a listener’s ear, because, antecedently, they raise pictures of inevitable disappointment for the speaker, in some direction or another.
‘Nothing for us to be alarmed at,’ said Edward, with a forced cheerfulness.
The old man’s eyes swept the horizon, then he turned to go in, without making another observation. All light seemed extinguished in him again. When Edward went in he found his father with the bureau open, unfolding the leases with a shaking hand, folding them up again without reading them, then putting them in their niche only to remove them again.