“I got tired of him, of it, of all!” She turned her eyes on him. “You have never tried, have you, being adored from morning to night?”
“Never.”
“It is sickening. Like living upon sweetmeats. I used to try to provoke him, and if once I could have got him out of temper, there might have been some hope. If he had contradicted me! I longed for a breath of fresh air. And dragging on—oh, he made a mistake all through. Of course you can’t understand—” She ended abruptly.
He felt a burning desire to assure her that he could, but his muttered words struck him as absurdly inadequate. Silence became more eloquent. Anne broke it at last—
“It was a hundred pities,” she mused, “and rough on him, for what could I say? What reason could I give? Tell him that he bored me? I couldn’t, I couldn’t! I can’t lose my friends. No, no, no, poor fellow! Here we come upon all those people, and Blanche is beckoning wildly, and I can’t think how I have had the face to talk to you. Forget it!”
With a sudden movement, for which he was unprepared, she sprang from him, and ran down the steep slope. He restrained the impulse to quicken his own pace, and by the time he reached the road, the carrioles had started, and Mrs Ravenhill and Millie, the clergyman and his wife, were moving off in a cloud of dust. Wareham, in spite of the impatience of his skydsgut, held back until carriages and dust had rolled away in the distance.
Tumultuous thought made it at first impossible to grasp a single idea, and to hold on to it as a centre for others. Anne’s face, the flutter of a small curl on her forehead, softly outlined arch of eyebrows, all manner of idiotic fancies, hustled and jostled each other in his brain; and he presently became aware that instead of sending the airy traitors to the right-about, he was encouraging them to stand, wall-like, between himself and the truth about himself. Too strong a man to keep up the mask when once he discovered it, he proceeded to chase the busy throng. From behind them Anne’s face peeped again.
He dragged out a hiding fact, and held it bare to his own scorn. He loved her—loved her; and though but a day before the amazement of it would have struck him mute, it had already ceased to look strange. All had led to it. The inconceivable would have been his failing to love. So far his heart with easy swing.
But judgment stood stubborn in refusal to go with it. Judgment it was which held the scourge. With Hugh Forbes in the background, what might be acknowledged natural became also offensive. As Wareham jogged along the white road, unheedful of bold outlines or lovely verdure, he found himself mentally writing to his friend, and recoiling with a start. How could he word such a dispatch—“I have seen the woman for whom you are breaking your heart. I love her myself, and shall try to win her”? The very thought was brutal.
Yet—to resign her for a dream, even for an ill-placed devotion, what could be more foolish and morbid? What fresh chance could come to Hugh? His had passed when, sooner than carry out an engagement, she had broken away abruptly, and faced the talk and jibes of her world by venturing on a course for which blame was the more unsparingly heaped on her because it was inexplicable. Hugh was young, handsome, ardent. Until this moment Wareham had fancied him the very man to catch the fancy of a woman, and it was only since Anne had lifted the curtain which friendship held tight, that he could admit that possible something—was it the power of boring?—which had driven her from him. This was what she meant when she said she had no patience. That patience should be wanted!