"I wish I could," she murmured. "Honestly, I wish I could."
He pressed her no more; if he had, she might possibly at last have given a reluctant assent. That he would not have, even had it been in his power to gain it.
"I'll come back—after the holidays," he said.
She looked up and met his glance.
"Yes, after the holidays," she repeated absently.
"You go to Ashwood?"
There was a pause before she answered. It came into her mind suddenly that it would have been strange to go to Ashwood as Weston Marchmont's promised wife. Why she could not quite tell; perhaps because such a position would set her very much outside of all that was being thought and talked of there, indeed in a quasi-antagonism to it. Anyhow the position would make her feel quite differently towards it all.
"Yes," she answered at last, and mustered a laugh as she added, "I'm not so particular as you, you know. And Amy wants me."
"I wish you always did what people want you to," said he, smiling.
Their parting was in this lighter vein, although on his side still tender and on hers penitent. In both was a consciousness of not understanding, of being somehow apart, of an inexplicable difficulty in taking one another's point of view. The solution of sympathy, the break that May had talked of, made itself apparent again. In spite of self-reproaches, her strongest feeling, when she was left alone, was of joy that her freedom still was hers.