A table on which had lain a Spectator and Fortnightly Review was littered over now with copies of the Young Ladies’ Journal, some cheap and highly colored sweets, an untidy workbasket.
In Strone himself the change was wonderful. Life had narrowed in upon him; he looked forward with a shudder, the past was as a sealed book. Only some days there came little flashes of memory. He found himself suddenly recalling those wonderfully sweet days of his freedom, when every shadow of care seemed to pass away as he rode out from Gascester, when the wind and the sun and the song of the birds had been his companions. That was all over now. He climbed the steep hill with listless footsteps, no longer full of anticipation of those long hours of exquisite solitude which had become so dear to him. Those days had gone by—forever.
Milly would be waiting at the door, would shower upon him caresses which long ago had palled, would chatter emptily, and dwell peevishly on the long day’s solitude. He found himself thinking with a shiver of the interminable evening. There was no escape. If he went out she would follow him; if he read, she sulked. He groaned to himself as he turned the last corner and caught a glimpse of the gray smoke curling upward.
Then he stopped short in the middle of the lane. What little color the heat had brought into his cheeks died away. He looked wildly around, as though half inclined to leap the gray-stone wall and vanish in the tangled wilderness beyond. Yet there was nothing more alarming in the way than a smartly turned-out victoria descending the hill toward him, and, leaning back among the cushions, a tired-looking woman in a white dress and hat with pink roses. Almost at the same moment she saw him, and, leaning forward, she stopped the carriage. To his amazement she stepped lightly out, gave the man an order, and waited for him in the shade of a great oak tree which overhung the road.
He ground his teeth together and advanced to meet her steadily. She greeted him with her old quiet smile. She, too, he thought, was looking pale and listless.
“I’m so glad to see you. Do you mind resting your bicycle somewhere and coming into the shade? I will not keep you very long.”
He obeyed her in silence. Words seemed difficult to him just then. They stood in the shadow of the trees which hung over from the wood. She lowered her parasol and seemed for a moment intent upon studying the pattern of the filmy lace. The man’s heart beat out like a sledge hammer. Yet he stood there, slowly mastering his emotion, and it was the woman who found speech so difficult.
“I am going to tell you something,” she said at last, “which a few days ago I was very sure that I would never tell you.”
She pauses. He remains speechless, his eyes fastened upon her.
“Go on.”