“Yes I do—my dearest—” she said, with a moan that was tragically at variance with the confession. “Ah, why do you make me so wicked!” She snatched herself away from him, and stood up, trembling all over. “I wish I had never seen you—I wish I was dead.”
“I don’t care what you say now,” said Hawkins, springing to his feet, “you’ve said you loved me, and I know you mean it. Will you stand by it?” he went on wildly. “If you’ll only say the word I’ll chuck everything overboard—I can’t go away from you like this. Once I’m in England I can’t get back here, and if I did, what good would it be to me? He’d never give us a chance of seeing each other, and we’d both be more miserable than we are, unless—unless there was a chance of meeting you in Dublin or somewhere—?” He stopped for an instant. Francie mutely shook her head. “Well, then, I shall never see you.”
There was silence, and the words settled down into both their hearts. He cursed himself for being afraid of her, she, whom he had always felt to be his inferior, yet when he spoke it was with an effort.
“Come away with me out of this—come away with me for good and all! What’s the odds? We can’t be more than happy!”
Francie made an instinctive gesture with her hand while he spoke, as if to stop him, but she said nothing, and almost immediately the distant rush and rattle of a train came quietly into the stillness.
“That’s his train!” she exclaimed, looking as startled as if the sound had been a sign from heaven. “Oh, go away! He mustn’t meet you coming away from here.”
“I’ll go if you give me a kiss,” he answered drunkenly. His arms were round her again, when they dropped to his side as if he had been shot.
There was a footstep on the path immediately below the lilac bushes, and Charlotte’s voice called to Francie that she was just starting for home and had come to make her adieux.
CHAPTER XLIX.
Christopher Dysart drove to Rosemount next morning to see Mr. Lambert on business. He noticed Mrs. Lambert standing at the drawing-room window as he drove up, but she left the window before he reached the hall door, and he went straight to Mr. Lambert’s study without seeing her again.