"You don't happen to be coming down, Miss Gleed?"
"I don't think it very likely."
"It—it wouldn't of course be worth your while——"
"It would! It would! It would be more than worth it; but, to be quite frank, I don't know that I shall ever come down again, Mr. Carlton."
Was he sorry? He did not even show surprise; and not a word more: for he had heard stray words in Long Stow concerning Gwynneth's departure and its reason as alleged. "I should have liked you to see the church," was all he said.
"And do you know," rejoined Gwynneth, speaking out her mind at last, "that I am in no great hurry to see it? I know it is foolish of me—for no one man could have finished such a work—no other man living would have got as far as you did without a soul to help you! Yet somehow I don't so much want to see the church that they came in and finished; it would spoil the picture that I can see so plainly now, and always shall—of the stones you cut and the walls you built with your own two hands—and every other hand against you!"
She was holding out her own. Carlton looked from it to her face, a strange surprise in his eyes. He had wriggled out of one of his gloves, and was twisting it round the iron paling at the corner where they stood.
"May I come no further?" he said.
"No, I could not think of taking you another yard out of your way. And it is really not so very many yards from where we stand!"
Gwynneth smiled brightly; but her voice was the very firm one of this half-hour of her existence. And ever afterwards she was to marvel why neither smile nor words were an effort to her at the time: so his presence supported her to the end, when the clasp of that indomitable hand, now bare, and horny even through her glove, left Gwynneth outwardly unmoved. She returned his pressure with honest warmth; her smile was kind and bright; then the cold mist fell between them in a widening yellow gulf, with a diminishing patter of firm footsteps, that Carlton could hear when the nurse's streamers had quite disappeared in the fog.