‘For heaven’s sake don’t talk,’ he said in a low voice, when he had got over his first astonishment. ‘Don’t you know Mother will hear?’
Sally couldn’t help that. She had got to say it. God was on her side. His laws were going to be broken, and nothing made Sally so brave as having to take up the cudgels in defence of God’s laws. Besides, if the dark prevented Jocelyn from seeing her beauty it saved her from seeing the icy displeased look on his face that made her falter off into silence. And she was in despair. Apart from the right or the wrong of it, she felt she couldn’t possibly be left alone with Mrs. Luke. Therefore, having mentioned God’s laws to him, she proceeded to entreat him to take her with him, it didn’t matter into what hole, or let her go to her father’s, and he come and see her whenever he had time.
‘I told you—I told you the other day,’ said Sally, trying to subdue her voice to a whisper, but it kept on breaking through, ‘when you was only goin’ to be away for two days that I didn’t ’alf like it. ’Ow do you suppose I’m goin’ to like weeks and weeks? And it ain’t right, Mr. Luke—it ain’t right. You only got to read St. Mark——’
Jocelyn was amazed. Sally talking like this? Sally suddenly making difficulties, and having an opinion, and judging? Dragging in the Bible, too, just like somebody’s cook.
‘You don’t understand,’ he said in a low voice because of his mother, but a voice quite as full of anger as if he had been shouting. ‘How can you? What do you know about anything?’
‘I know what ain’t bein’ one flesh,’ persisted Sally, greatly helped in the matter of courage by the dark.
He gathered his dressing-gown round him; it sounded exactly as if a servant were daring to talk familiarly to him.
‘This isn’t the time,’ he whispered, infinitely disgusted, ‘to argue.’
‘P’raps you’ll tell me when the time is, then,’ said Sally, who knew she could never be alone with him in the day because of Mrs. Luke; and really in the dark, unable to see her, Jocelyn had the impression of some woman of the lower classes confronting him with arms akimbo.
‘Certainly not at one in the morning,’ he said freezingly. ‘I shall go downstairs again. I didn’t come up here to listen to outrageous rot.’