'I suppose I shall go back again,' said Caldigate, with an air of indifference.
'Go back again!' said Maria, who had not imagined this. But still a man going back to Australia might take a wife with him. She would not object to the voyage. Her remembrance of the evening on which she had crept down and put the little book into his valise was so strong that she felt herself to be justified in being in love with him. 'But not for always?'
'Certainly not;—but just to wind up affairs.'
It would be no more than a pleasant wedding-tour,—and, perhaps, she could do something for poor Dick. She could take the shirts so far on their destination.
'Oh, Mr. Caldigate, how well I remember that last night!'
'So indeed, do I,—and the book.' The hardship upon the moth is that though he has already scorched himself terribly in the flame, and burned up all the tender fibre of his wings, yet he can't help returning to the seductions of the tallow-candle till his whole body has become a wretched cinder. Why should he have been the first to speak of the book?
Of course she blushed, and of course she stammered. But in spite of her stammering she could say a word. 'I dare say you never looked at it.'
'Indeed I did,—very often. Once when Dick saw it in my hands, he wanted to take it away from me.'
'Poor Dick!'
'But I have never parted with it for an hour!'