“I know you would never forget it,” she said.
He did not contradict her; he looked first at his watch, then along the platform for the approach of her train. To admit that he might forget it was impossible to him; in such a case forgetfulness would be a negation of his principles and a slur on his perception. It would also be such a triumph over his vanity and his pride as it did not lie in him to achieve, such a forgiveness as his faults and virtues combined to put beyond the power of his nature. She looked at him; and “I smiled,” she said, not seeming herself to know why she had smiled, but conscious that, in the midst of her woe, some subtly amusing thought about him had come into her mind. She had never been amused at him before; so she, too, was getting some glimmer of a revelation out of the day’s experience—not the awful blaze of light that had flashed on Harold’s eyes, but a dim ray, just enough to give cause to that puzzled smile for which she could not explicitly account.
So they parted, and for persons who have followed the affair at all closely it is hardly necessary to add that they never came together again. This issue was obvious, and Winifred seems to have made up her mind to it that very same evening, for she called her mother into her room (as the good lady passed on the way to bed) and looked up from the task of brushing the grey frock which she had spread out on the sofa.
“I don’t think I shall marry Mr Jackson now, mother,” she said.
Mrs Petheram looked at her daughter and at her daughter’s gown.
“You’d better tell me more about it to-morrow. You look tired to-night, dear,” she replied.
But Winifred never told her any more—in the first place, because the family was too delighted with the fact to care one straw about how it had come to pass, and, in the second place, on the more important ground that the thing was really too small, too trivial, and too absurd to bear telling—at least to the family. To me, for some reason or other, Winifred did tell it, or some of it—enough, anyhow, to enable me, with the help of a few touches of imagination, to conjecture how it occurred.
“Don’t you think it was very absurd?” she asked at the end of her story. We were sitting by the yew hedge, near the library windows, looking across the flower beds to the meadow; it was a beautiful day, and the old place was charming. “Because,” she added, “I did love him, you know; and it seems a small thing to separate about, doesn’t it?”
“If he had behaved differently——” I began.
“I don’t see how he could be expected to,” she murmured.