"Why should I have the rooms done up? I shall never live here. What is it to me how they are left? The sooner I stop a useless expenditure the better. It was being done for her, not for me."
"Of course you will live here."
"You know nothing about it. You cannot know anything about it. Why has she treated me in this way? To send up to a man and simply tell him that she has changed her mind! God in heaven!—that you should bring me such a message!"
"You have not allowed me to give my message yet."
"Give it me, then, and have done with it. Has she not sent you to tell me that she has changed her mind?"
Now that opportunity was given to him, the Vicar did not know how to tell his message. "Perhaps it would have been better that Janet should have come to you."
"It don't make much difference who comes. She'll never come again. I don't suppose, Frank, you can understand the sort of love I have had for her. You have never been driven by failure to such longing as mine has been. And then I thought it had come at last!"
"Will you be patient while I speak to you, Harry?" said the Vicar, again taking him by the arm. They had now left the house, and were out alone among the shrubs.
"Patient! yes; I think I am patient. Nothing further can hurt me now;—that's one comfort."
"Mary bids me remind you,"—Gilmore shuddered and shook himself when Mary Lowther's name was mentioned, but he did not attempt to stop the Vicar,—"she bids me remind you that when the other day she consented to be your wife, she did so—." He tried to tell it all, but he could not. How could he tell the man the story which Mary had told to him?