“You should not have allowed yourself to be forced, mother or no mother. A girl like you!”
“She was dying. She said to me: ‘Will you let me go down to the grave without having my one request granted? I have done everything for you—will you not do this one thing for me so that I may close my eyes in peace?’”
He shook his head. Then he looked at her, but he only saw the back of her head; she had turned away her face and her eyes were on the ground. He knew that they were full of tears. They walked on slowly for some time, and then he took his right hand out of the pocket of his jacket and let it drop till it was on a level with her left. Very gently his fingers closed over hers for a moment—only a moment.
“I was wrong,” he said. “There was nothing else left for you to do; but it was rough on you. Well, well; you have had a bad year of it—that’s all, but you might have had a bad fifty years. It’s odd how the rights of a story do get about somehow, whatever people may say. Now that gossipy old woman, Mrs. Pearce, was only too glad to tell me all about you when you went away that day we met; and when I said that it was your own fault—that it was a shame, but you had made your own bed—she took your part and said that if duty to a mother was a fault, then you were to blame. She holds that a girl should do just what a mother tells her to do in all matters, but especially as regards marriage. I don’t. But then I fancy I miss my gear pretty frequently when I try to express myself on most matters. I’m all for independence of thought and action. That’s why they presented me with the Fellowship at the University.”
“A Fellowship—and you said you had no brains?” She had recovered herself and was now looking at him with only the smallest trace of her former emotion in her face.
“A Fellowship—yes, the Fellowship of the Boot,” he said with a grin.
“Oh, you were sent down?”
“If you wish to put it that way.”
“It was your independence of thought that did it?”
“Beyond a doubt. You see, I never could see the humour in talking of the University as the Varsity; and I pretended not to understand one of the dons—the surliest and the most ignorant of the lot, if I knew anything——”