There was truth enough in what he said to make me feel a difficulty in replying. We had come to the gate, and he opened it for me.
“I do not wish to press you on this subject, my dear, but I am sure that, after you have thought it over a little, your fairness, as well as your kind heart, will make you feel the truth of what I have been saying to you.”
That was all he said, but it was enough. I went back to the house, feeling that, whatever happened, trouble was before me.
Roche met me on the steps with a note on a salver. I knew the handwriting, and opened it with a pulse quickened by a delightful glow of confidence and expectancy. I read it through twice over; then, mechanically replacing it in the envelope, I went up to my own room, and, throwing myself on my bed, I pressed my face into the pillow and wished that I were dead.
CHAPTER VII.
“THIS HIDDEN TIDE OF TEARS.”
“Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been.”
“Ah me! my heart, rememberest thou that hour,
When foolish hope made parting almost bright?
Hadst thou not then some warning of thy doom?”
The fire in the library was dying out. I had been sitting on the hearthrug in front of it for some time, with my elbows resting on the seat of a low armchair, from whose depths Jinny’s snores rose with quiet regularity. The window had been grey with the last of the dull light when I first sat down there, and, without stirring, I had watched the grey fading by imperceptible changes from mere blankness into an absolute darkness, that invaded the room and filled it like a cloud.