‘Fear oftentimes restraineth words,
But makes not thoughts to cease.’
The weather since the beginning of the summer has been exceptionally warm, and to-day has outdone itself.
Here in the Cottage garden, surrounded by its ivied walls, the heat is excessive, and there is a certain languor in the lithe figure of the girl as she comes forward, the dog beside her, to greet Wyndham, that meets his eye. Perhaps nervousness has conduced to the pallor that is whitening her lips and brow, and is making even more striking the darkness of her appealing eyes. There is something about her so full of grief suppressed that he hastens to allay it.
‘I have come, you see,’ says he—he holds out his hand, and she lays hers in it; he holds it a moment—‘to speak about our rent.’ He smiles at her. The smile, to tell the truth, is a little grim, and hardly reassures her. ‘I have come to the conclusion that, as you wish to become my tenant, you must pay me a huge rent.’
‘Ah! and I have been thinking,’ says she very sadly, with the mournful air of one who is giving up all that is worth having in this world, ‘that I shall not be your tenant at all, and shall never pay you any rent.’
‘Do you mean to say,’ says Wyndham, reading her like a book, but humouring her mood, ‘that you’ve found another house more suited to you?’
‘Oh no, it isn’t that. There is no house I shall ever like so well as this.’
‘Then, let me tell you beforehand that I shall charge you a very handsome rent,’ persists Wyndham, trying to be genial. He smiles at her, but the smile is a dismal failure.
‘I can’t accept your offer—I can’t indeed,’ says the girl, who, in spite of her protests, has brightened considerably beneath his apparent determination to let the Cottage to her. ‘This is your own house. Your mother gave it to you. Mrs. Denis has told me all about it, and if you give it to me you will never come here again.’