“I know—and you were a dear brother. It was just my foolishness to want you to be something else.”
For a moment she clung to me, hiding her face against my shoulder. Then we passed down the stairs, afraid to be alone any longer.
“Goin’?” Hetty inquired. “You won’t tell the master, will yer?” She glanced toward the study-door as though he were behind it and might have overheard.
At the end of the lane the carriage was standing. In the presence of the coachman Ruthita’s tones were conventional. “You’re going westwards? Where can I drop you?”
In the carriage I asked her whether her husband would know of what we had done.
“I shall tell him.”
“Don’t you think he might be willing to let us be friends?”
“I’ll ask him,” she said, “but——”
At Hyde Park Corner the carriage pulled up and I alighted. I watched her eager face looking back at me, growing smaller and smaller.
Wandering aimlessly through the parks, I sat for a time by the Serpentine. The nerves of all that had happened in the past five years were cut. If I had married Ruthita, would she have been happy? The thought of marrying her was just as impossible to me now as it had been when Grandmother Cardover had mentioned it at Ransby. And yet, at a time when I had been most sensitive of injustice, I had been unjust to her—— And now she was going to be a mother—little Ruthita, who seemed to me herself so much a child!