Nor did he care two straws for the mystery that surrounded her. Wherever she came from, whatever her name or her history or her reason for living as she did, he knew that she was right, and could never be anything else.
No—the things that troubled him were those things which so often trouble people in his condition—all sorts of doubts and alarms and hopes and determinations mixed[Pg 118] together. He wasn’t good enough, but he was obliged to convince her that he was. She couldn’t care for him, and yet she must.
At last he saw her coming, and went forward to meet her. She was walking unusually fast, as if, he thought with a fast beating heart, she were hurrying to him. Whatever joy he had felt in that thought vanished at the sight of her face.
“Judith!” he said. “Tell me, what has happened?”
She had all her usual fine composure, but she was very pale, and, in some subtle way apparent more to his heart than to his eyes, there was grief upon her face. She did not answer him, but she held out her hand, and he fancied that she clung to him.
“Let’s walk a little,” she said, after a moment.
They went on side by side along the lane, thick with cool, white dust under the old trees. So dense was the foliage on the branches meeting overhead that the light came through it greenish and wavering, like water. The dust might have been the sandy floor of the sea, and the church bells that rang seemed mournful and distant, as they must sound to the mermaids.
A painful sense of unreality oppressed Alan. He didn’t know her; she was terribly remote, a stranger, indifferent to him. Not once in all the time they had spent together had she talked freely about herself, about her life. She might have any number of anxieties and griefs of which he had no suspicion. She had been friendly, but in such an impersonal, untroubled way!
At last they reached the fence at the foot of the lane, where the fields began, and she spoke.
“Noel has gone,” she said.