“Then good-bye.” And she gave him her hand again.
He had got his dismissal; besides which, in the agitation of everything that had opened out to him, he felt the need to recover himself as he could only do in solitude. Yet he lingered—lingered to see if she had no compromise to express, no attenuation to propose. But he only met her great lamenting eyes, in which indeed he read that she was as sorry for him as for any one else. This made him say: “At least, in any case, I may see you here.”
“Oh yes, come if you like. But I don’t think it will do.”
He looked round the room once more, knowing how little he was sure it would do. He felt also stricken and more and more cold, and his chill was like an ague in which he had to make an effort not to shake. Then he made doleful reply: “I must try on my side—if you can’t try on yours.” She came out with him to the hall and into the doorway, and here he put her the question he held he could least answer from his own wit. “Why have you never let me come before?”
“Because my aunt would have seen you, and I should have had to tell her how I came to know you.”
“And what would have been the objection to that?”
“It would have entailed other explanations; there would at any rate have been that danger.”
“Surely she knew you went every day to church,” Stransom objected.
“She didn’t know what I went for.”
“Of me then she never even heard?”