“Ellida took her share,” he said.
“Ellida’s Ellida,” she answered. “She’s a darling, but she’s not me. If you’d take the steps you might, you could have me, and I’d have father’s money. But that’s all there is to it. I’ll do all I can for Dudley Leicester. Don’t let’s talk about the other thing.”
They came down to the hard road over the bank.
“Now we shall see what’s under the weathercock,” she said.
V
IT was as if in the churchyard, amongst the old and slanting tombs, in the sunlight and in the extended fingers of the yews, there was the peace of God. In the highroad, as it passed through the little hamlet, not a single person stirred. The cottage doors stood open, and as they had passed they could hear even the ticking of the clocks. The dust on the highroad was stamped into little patterns by the feet of a flock of sheep that, from the hill above, they had seen progressing slowly at a great distance.
“The peace of God,” Robert Grimshaw said. They were sitting in the small plastered porch of the little old church.
“‘The peace of God, which passeth all understanding....’ I’ve always thought that those words, coming where they do, are the most beautiful thing in any rite. It’s like ...” He seemed to be about to enter on a long train of thought, but suddenly he said, “Oh, my dear,” and he laid his head on her shoulder, his eyes closed, and the lines of his face drooping. They sat silent for a long time, and slowly into hers there came an expression of a deep and restful tenderness, a minute softening of all the lines and angles of his chiselled countenance; and at last he said, very low: “Oh, you must end it!” and she answered in an echo of his tone: “No, no. Don’t ask me. It isn’t fair;” and she knew that if she looked at his tired face again, or if again his voice sounded so weary, that she would surrender to his terms.
He answered: “Oh, I’m not asking that. I promised that I wouldn’t, and I’m not. It’s the other thing that you must end. You don’t know what it means to me.”
She said: “What?” with an expression of bewilderment, a queer numb expression, and whilst he brought out in slow and rather broken phrases, “It’s an unending strain ... And I feel I am responsible ... It goes on night and day ... I can’t sleep ... I can’t eat ... I have got the conviction that suddenly he might grow violent and murder....” Her face was hardening all the while. It grew whiter and her eyes darkened.