“I have never been used to you,” he muttered, and she knew that, telling this truth, he also explained a good deal. “I never should be. You’re like nobody else—nobody.”
“But it is too much strain,” she murmured slowly.
“Yes—well, it is you who have said it. I had made up my mind—I’m not ungrateful—I never intended to say a word.”
She smiled. This was the first remark which had really touched her. She found it so offensive that a smile was the only weapon with which to meet it. “I know that.”
“But mind,” he almost shouted, “there’s nobody like you.”
“Yes, yes, I know that too.” She turned to him with a silencing sternness. “I tell you I know everything.”
§ 2
The old groom who held her horse nodded with satisfaction when he helped her into the saddle. She had not lost her spring and he tightened her girths in a leisurely manner and arranged her skirt with the care due to a fine rider and a lady who understood a horse, yet one who was always ready to ask an old man’s advice. He had a great admiration for Miss Mallett and, conscious of it and rather pathetically glad of it, she lingered for the pleasure of talking to some one who seemed simple and untroubled. He had spent all his life on the Sales estate, and she wondered whether, though, like herself, of a limited outward experience, he also had known the passions of love and disgust and shame. He was sixty-five, he told her, but as strong as ever, and she envied him: to be sixty-five with the turmoil of life behind him, yet to be strong enough to enjoy the peace before him, was a good finale to existence. She was only thirty-one, but she was strong too, and she felt as though she had come through a storm, battered and exhausted but whole and ready for the calm which already hovered over her. She said, “The young are always sorry for the old, but that is one of the many mistakes they make. I think it must be the best time of all.”
“If you have them that cares for you,” he answered.
That was where her own happiness would break down.