They had descended the incline by this time, and were close to the cottage gate. It lay open, and Cæsar ran up to the prim little green door.
"Come here, sir," called Clare; "please let him have the basket again, Mr. Ward. Old Willcox reared him for me, from a puppy, and he likes to see him at his tricks. Thank you. Now then, go on, Cæsar."
Her hand was on the open gate, her face turned away from the cottage, towards George--it was no easier to her to say good-bye than to him, he thought; but it must be said, so he began to say it.
"Then, Miss Carruthers, here I must leave you; and soon I must leave Amherst."
Perhaps he hoped she would repeat the invitation of yesterday. She did not; she only said:
"Thank you very much for your escort, Mr. Ward. Good-bye."
It was the coldest, most constrained of adieux. He felt it so, and yet he was not altogether dissatisfied; he would have been more so, had she retained the natural grace of her manner and the sweet gaiety of her tone. He would have given much to touch her hand at parting, but she did not offer it; but with a bow passed up the little walk to the cottage door, and in a moment the door had closed upon her, and she was lost to his sight.
He lingered upon the high road from which he could see the cottage, and gazed at the window, in the hope of catching another glimpse of Clare; but suddenly remembering that she might perhaps see him from the interior of the room, and be offended by his doing so, he walked briskly away in a frame of mind hard to describe, and with feelings of a conflicting character. Above the tumult of new-born love, of pride, rage, mortification, anger, hope, the trust of youth in itself, and dawning resolutions of good, there was this thought, clear and prominent:
"If I am ever to see her again, it shall be in my own character, and by no tricky subterfuge. If she ever comes to care for me, she shall not be ashamed of me."
George Dallas returned to the inn, where his taciturnity and preoccupation did not escape notice by the waiters and Mr. Page, who accounted for it by commenting on his request for writing-materials, to the use of which he addressed himself in his own room, as a "hoddity of the literary gents; if they ain't blabby and blazin' drunk, they're most times uncommon sullen. This un's a poetical chap, I take it."