“Mind you say nothing, dear,” she said, as they crossed the lawn. “You know that I hate a fuss.” And Katherine, who had stopped on the grass and was staring at the horizon, did not even answer. Then Aunt Betty came up and said: “What a delightful sermon! Mr. Smart gets better and better.”
Aunt Aggie did not trust herself to speak.
Meanwhile Philip also had been unhappy. He did frankly hate an English Sunday, and to-day the damp-grey heaviness overwhelmed him, so that he was almost melodramatic in his resentment.
Four days now had passed since the “Feast”, and he thought that they had been the worst four days of his life. He, positively, had not slept: he had been driven by a wild, uncertain spirit, inspiring him now to this action and now to that, making him cry out in the middle of the night. “What is she thinking about it? Is it changing her love for me?... Perhaps she doesn’t love me any more, and is afraid to tell me. She didn’t seem angry then when I told her, but she may not have realised—now—” He wanted her to tell him everything, and he wanted her also never to allude to the affair again. He had confessed to her, and there was no more to be said—and yet she must say what now, after four days, she felt about it. Meanwhile she said nothing and he said nothing. There was constraint between them for the only time since their first meeting. He had thought that his confession would have smashed the cobwebs—it had only made them the more blinding.
Meanwhile it was all so desperately serious to him that he simply could not endure the watching and waiting family. His insistent desire that ‘things should be perfect’ had from the beginning been balked by the family’s presence, now his sense that they all wanted to take Katherine away from him awoke in him a real hysterical nightmare of baffled impotence. He would willingly have strangled Aunt Aggie, Henry and Mrs. Trenchard, and then set fire to the house and garden. Then, into the middle of it all, came this impossible Sunday.
He set his teeth over the roast beef, Aunt Aggie’s complaints and George Trenchard’s hearty commonplace; directly luncheon was over he seized Katherine.
“Look here! we must go for a walk—now—at once!”
“My dear Phil! I can’t—there’s my Sunday School at three. I haven’t looked at anything.”
“Sunday School! Oh, my God!... Sunday School! Look here, Katie, if you don’t walk with me first I shall go straight down to the village pond and drown myself.”
“No, you mustn’t do that.” She seemed quite grave about it. “All right—wait for me. I’ll be down in two minutes.”