“Well, we must give Mr. Verity his revenge,” she teased.
“But it can’t hurt me now I’m out of politics,” he said, confessing by his tone that it would hurt him very much.
“It will please him, though,” she said.
“I’d... I’d thought of going to America,” he ventured.
“America!” scoffed Dubby. “O sancta simplicitas! America’s not El Dorado, Sam. El Dorado’s been found. I’d even say it’s been found out.”
“There are big things in America,” Sam defended his idea.
“As a matter of fact, Dubby,” said Effie, silencing him, “we shall go to Marbeek for a little while. It’s a good place to begin from.”
With that a great contentment came to Sam. They were to go to Marbeek; they were to begin; and he no longer questioned what. He made no hard and fast surrender of his will, but recognized the fact, not for the first time, that when Effie made a decision it had a shining rightness. Perhaps she had retreated from her first decision of Marbeck, but, if so, Anne helping him, he had retreated with her; and they went to Marbeek now, not to end, but to begin, and to begin together.
Reflecting on it all, he could not see the blemish. He couldn’t, for the life of him, make out why Anne was not content.
He half explained the valley’s failure to enchant her when he perceived that she had not really looked at it. At what, then, could she be looking? And how could she, how in the name of beauty was it possible for anyone to pick out from all that noble amphitheatre of the hills the one smoke-clouded spot?