"My dear, how cold you are! Let me make you warm if I can."
And then, in his own quiet, tender way, Dr. Grey wrapped her up in her shawl and rolled a rug about her feet. She took no notice, submitted passively, and neither spoke a word more till they had driven on for two or three miles, into a country road leading to a village where Avonsbridge people sometimes went for summer lodgings.
Christian knew it well. There, just before her father's death, he and she had lived, for four delicious, miserable, momentous weeks. She had never seen the place since, but now she recognized it—every tree, every field, the very farm-house garden, once so bright, now lying deep in snow. She began tremble in every limb.
"Why are we here? This is not our right road. Where are we going?"
"I did not mean to come this way, but we missed the train, and cannot reach London tonight; so I thought we would post across country to E____," naming a quiet cathedral town, "where you can rest, and go on when or where you please. Will that do?"
"Oh yes."
"You are not dissatisfied? We could not help missing the train, you see."
"Oh no."
The quick, sharp, querulous answers—that last refuge of a fictitious strength that was momentarily breaking down—he saw it all, this good man, this generous, pitiful-hearted man, who knew what sorrow was, and who for a whole year had watched her with the acuteness which love alone teaches, especially the love which, coming late in life, had a calmness and unselfishness which youthful love rarely possesses. The sort of love which, as he had once quoted to her out of an American book, could feel, deeply and solemnly, "that if a man really loves a woman, he would not marry her for the world, were he not quite sure he was the best person she could by any possibility marry"—that is, the one who loved her so perfectly that he was prepared to take upon himself all the burden of her future life, her happiness or sorrow, her peculiarities, shortcomings, faults, and all.
This, though he did not speak a word, was written, plain as in a book, on the face of Christian's husband, as he watched her, still silently, for another mile, till the early winter sun-set, bursting through the leaden-colored, snowy sky, threw a faint light in at the carriage window.