She raised her eyes to his as if inviting him to gaze into their clear depths and to behold there his own image innocently enshrined. To dissemble with so artless a creature was quite impossible.
“Something is troubling you, Harry. Tell me!”
“Call it my conscience. To accept so much”—he spoke passionately—“and to be able to give so little; to know, as I do, that my love may bring distress and unhappiness upon you! Ah, that tears me! I must speak plainly now, or never. What is Upworthy to you? Have you ever tried to measure your feeling for this village and all that goes with it? Are you able to set a valuation, so to speak, upon it?”
“My dear old home. . . . I don’t quite see what you are driving at. What do you mean by a valuation?”
“I mean this. I lay awake last night realising the inevitable fact that if you marry me against your mother’s wishes you risk—disinheritance.”
“Disinheritance! Why, Harry, mother loves me. She would never do that. Never, never, never. You don’t know her——”
“I don’t. Do you? Does she know herself? Do any of us know ourselves? Are we able to say confidently what we would do, or not do, till some supreme test comes along?”
She considered his words carefully; her eyes clouded with perplexity, her lips quivered.
“You are making me miserable.”
“At what a cost to my own feelings! But we must face things together, as they are, not as we would like them to be. First and last, it comes to this: In your own irresistible way you have invited me to join what I call the great conspiracy of silence in Upworthy. Better men than I are amongst the conspirators. Dear old Pawley, for example. It is natural for him, ten thousand times more so for you, to ‘spare’ your mother, to keep her in cotton wool, to please, in a word, a personality so gracious, so kindly at heart, so sincerely anxious to do the right thing in, alas! the wrong way. But, as an honest man, Cicely, I side with her tenants as against her.”