“No. Walking, please. I would be recognized. They might know me. I can walk. If you will help me.”
He drew her arm through his. “Lean on me,” he said. “We’ll go slowly.”
They went past the drawing-room windows and, softly opening, softly shutting, through the gate. The road, when it turned the corner, left the village behind; between its rarely placed trees, vague silhouettes against the sky that seemed of one texture with them, it showed its mournful pallor for only a little space before them; there was not enough light left in the sky to glimmer on its pools. The fields, on either side, vanished into obscurity. Pale cattle, once, over a hedge, put disconsolate heads and lowed and a garrulous dog, as they passed by, ran out from a way-side farm-yard, smelt at their heels, growled perfunctorily and, having satisfied his sense of duty, went back to his post. The sense of dumb emptiness was so complete that it was only after they had gone a long way that he knew that she was weeping and the soft, stifling sounds seemed only a part of nature’s desolation.
Her head bent down, she stumbled on, leaning on his arm, and from time to time she raised her handkerchief and pressed it to her mouth and nose. He did not say a word; nor did she.
As he led her along, submissive to her doom, it was another feeling of accomplishment that overwhelmed him; the dark after the radiant; after Nancy and Barney, he and Adrienne. It was this, from their first meeting, that he had been destined to mean to her. She was his appointed victim. He had killed, as really as if with a knife, the girl whom he had seen at Coldbrooks, in the sunlight, on that Sunday morning in spring, knowing no doubts. She had then held the world in her hands and a guileless, untried heaven had filled her heart. Between her and this crushed and weeping woman there seemed no longer any bond; unless it was the strange aching that, in his heart, held them both together.
PART II
CHAPTER I
OLDMEADOW sat in Mrs. Aldesey’s drawing-room and, the tea-table between them, Mrs. Aldesey poured out his tea. So it was, after three years, that they found each other. So it was, all over the world, Oldmeadow said to himself, that the tea-table, or its equivalent, reasserted itself in any interval where the kindly amenities of human intercourse could root themselves; though the world rocked and flames of anarchy rimmed its horizons.