“By marriage also,” she answered, and laughed and broke from his detaining hand and fled indoors.
Bobby looked after her in perplexity.
“By Jove! I had forgotten that chap,” he reflected, and recalled her earlier confidences with suddenly awakened suspicion and a mind not a little disturbed. He had been joking. Possibly Prudence had been joking also. But Wortheton without her would be a drear hole, he decided; and Wortheton and the factory were his ultimate and inevitable lot.
And yet he did not wish her to remain unmarried. His five spinster aunts and the unmarried women he had met that afternoon, hovering hungrily about the little curate, sickened him. Prudence had no place in that gallery. She was altogether too fine and too clever to be wasted in the narrow seclusion of this life which she led with such evident distaste. Of course she would marry and go away. That was the chief point; she would go away. It didn’t after all seem to matter who the fellow was, so long as he was a decent sort of chap and could provide for her an appreciate her qualities of beauty and intellect. If he didn’t appreciate her—so Bobby philosophised—it would be a case of out of the frying-pan into the fire; but whoever it was got into the flames, the young man felt comfortably assured it would not be Prudence. She would contrive her emancipation more thoroughly than that.
“I wish I had asked her more about that fellow,” he mused.
But he recognised that the time for asking questions was past.
Chapter Ten.
“I’ve been thinking,” Bobby remarked one evening to Prudence, when they strolled up the road together in the dusk, “about our talk the other afternoon; and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not the fault of the place, it’s our own fault, that we find life dull. One place is much like another. Either we want too much, or else we are dull in ourselves and can’t get the enjoyment out of life that is there for our taking. That’s what I make of it anyhow.”