“What is it, Rosamund?” he asked, half involuntarily, and conscious of the futility of the question.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said drearily.
It was the discontented child again.
Morris remained silent, plucking at the tough strands of heather all round him.
He felt injured.
He had come out on the moor prepared to sacrifice himself, to bid Rosamund a long farewell, and to take away with him only the memory of that bitter-sweet parting hour. Surely the intuition of love should have met him more than halfway. But Rosamund, with childish perversity, had harped upon the string of her own grievances, grievances which Morris could not but feel to be for the most part imaginary ones. She was not thinking about him at all, and all his wealth of love and self-sacrifice had gone unheeded. Morris began to feel angry, and, worse still, as though he were being made a fool of in his own eyes.
It did not calm him to reflect that he would probably appear in exactly the same light to the penetrating gaze of Bertha Tregaskis.
She was even now advancing slowly towards them, stooping every now and then to prod at some little root or plant and pull it up into her capacious basket.
Morris got up abruptly.
“Rosamund, do you know that I’m going away?”