“Hold me this paper,” she said. “It is necessary that every crack should be covered; also between the floor and the door.”
“You English are wonderful,” he murmured, as he took the paper. “Imagine you doing that! Then,” he added, resuming the confidential tone, “I suppose you will leave the Foucault now, hein?”
“I suppose so,” she said carelessly.
“You go to England?”
She turned to him, as she patted the creases out of a strip of paper with a duster, and shook her head.
“Not to England?”
“No.”
“If it is not indiscreet, where are you going?”
“I don’t know,” she said candidly.
And she did not know. She was without a plan. Her brain told her that she ought to return to Bursley, or, at the least, write. But her pride would not hear of such a surrender. Her situation would have to be far more desperate than it was before she could confess her defeat to her family even in a letter. A thousand times no! That was a point which she had for ever decided. She would face any disaster, and any other shame, rather than the shame of her family’s forgiving reception of her.