But she shook her head.
"No--if you cared for me enough, mebbe I'd go. But I don't know that we'd be together long if we did. I want my own life, my own, own, own life! I can look after myself all right...I'll be off by myself alone one day."
Then suddenly he wanted her as urgently as he had ever done.
"No, you must never do that," he said. "If you go it must be with me. You must have some one to look after you. You don't know what London's like."
He caught her in his arms and kissed her passionately, and she seemed to him a new woman altogether, created by her threat that she would go away alone.
She passively let him kiss her, then with a little turn in his arms and a little sigh she very gently kissed him of her own will.
"I believe I could care for 'ee," she said softly. "And I want to care for some one terrible bad."
They were nearer in spirit than they had ever been before; an emotion of simple human companionship had crept into the unsettled disturbance and quieted it and deepened it. She wore in his eyes a new aspect, something wise and reasonable and comfortable. She would never be quite so mysterious to him again, but her hold on him now was firmer. He was suddenly sorry for her as well as for himself.
For the first time he left her that night with a sense that comradeship might grow between them.
But as he went back up the hill he was terribly depressed and humiliated. He hated and despised himself for longing after something that he did not really want. He had always, he fancied, done that, as though there would never be time enough in life for all the things that he would wish to test and to reject.