They saw through the gloom the spot where Mary had scrambled, and the water which had then been bright and smiling, was now black and awful.
"To think that you should have been in there!" said Harry Gilmore, shuddering.
"To think that she should ever have got out again!" said the parson.
"It looks frightful in the dark," said Mrs. Fenwick. "Come away, Frank. It makes me sick." And the charming schemer took her husband's arm, and continued the round of the garden. "I have been talking to her, and I think she would take him if he would ask her now."
The other pair of course followed them. Mary's mind was so fully made up, at this moment, that she almost wished that her companion might ask the question. She had been told that she was misusing him; and she would misuse him no longer. She had a firm No, as it were, within her grasp, and a resolution that she would not be driven from it. But he walked on beside her talking of the water, and of the danger, and of the chance of a cold, and got no nearer to the subject than to bid her think what suffering she would have caused had she failed to extricate herself from the pool. He also had made up his mind. Something had been said by himself of a certain day when last he had pleaded his cause; and that day would not come round till the morrow. He considered himself pledged to restrain himself till then; but on the morrow he would come to her.
There was a little gate which led from the parsonage garden through the churchyard to a field path, by which was the nearest way to Hampton Privets.
"I'll leave you here," he said, "because I don't want to make Fenwick come out again to-night. You won't mind going up through the garden alone?"
"Oh dear, no."
"And, Miss Lowther,—pray, pray take care of yourself. I hardly think you ought to have been out again to-night."
"It was nothing, Mr. Gilmore. You make infinitely too much of it."