As they paused on the top of a rising ground looking westward he looked at her with sudden and kindly decision.
"Miss Elsmere, are you sure your mother would like to see me? It was very good of you to request that I should accompany you to-night--but--are you sure?"
Mary coloured deeply and hesitated a moment.
"Don't you think I'd better turn back?" he asked her, gently. "Your path is clear before you." He pointed to it winding through the fern. "And you know, I hope, that anything I could do for you and your mother during your stay here I should be only too enchanted to do. The one thing I shrink from doing is to interfere in any way with her rest here. And I am afraid just now I might be a disturbing element."
"No, no! please come!" said Mary, earnestly. Then as she turned her head away, she added: "Of course--there is nothing new--to her--"
"Except that my fight is waged from inside the Church--and your father's from outside. But that might make all the difference to her."
"I don't think so. It is"--she faltered--"the change itself. It is all so terrible to her."
"Any break with the old things? But doesn't it ever present itself to her--force itself upon her--as the upwelling of a new life?" he asked, sadly.
"Ah!--if it didn't in my father's case--"
But she quickly checked herself, and they moved on in silence. Meynell, with his pastoral instinct and training, longed to probe and soothe the trouble he divined in her. A great natural dignity in the girl--delicacy of feeling in the man--prevented it.
None the less her betrayal of emotion had altered their relation; or rather had carried it farther. For he had already seen her in contact with tragic and touching things. A day or two after that early morning when he had told the outlines of the Batesons' story to the two ladies who had entertained him at breakfast he had found her in Bateson's cottage with his wife. Bateson was dead, and his wife in that dumb, automaton state of grief when the human spirit grows poisonous to itself. The young girl who came and went with so few words and such friendly timid ways had stirred, as it were, the dark air of the house with a breath of tenderness. She would sit beside the widow, sewing at a black dress, or helping her to choose the text to be printed on the funeral card; or she would come with her hands full of wild flowers, and coax Mrs. Bateson to go in the dusk to the churchyard with them. She had shown, indeed, wonderful inventiveness in filling the first week of loss and anguish with such small incident as might satisfy feeling, and yet take a woman out of herself.