“Don’t, Katie—leave her alone. What do you go on about her for?”
“But if it’s all dead?”
“Oh, drop it, I say! That’s enough.”
She knew that she was a fool, but something—or was it somebody?—drove her on.
“But you said just now that you wanted me to be frank.”
His voice was a cry.
“You’ll drive me mad, Katie. You don’t seem to have any conception—”
“Very well. I won’t say anything.”
They were quite silent after that: the silence swelled, like a rising cloud, between them: it became impossible to break it ... they were at Garth gates, and they had not spoken. She would have said something, but he turned abruptly off into the garden. She walked, with her head up, into the house.
She went up to her room, arranged her Sunday School books, felt suddenly a grinding, hammering fatigue, as though she had been walking all day; her knees were trembling and her throat was dry. She sat by her window, looking down on to the garden, where the sea mist drove in walls of thin rain against the horizon. Behind the mist the trees seemed to peer at her as though they were wondering who she was. “I don’t care,” she thought, “he shouldn’t have spoken to me like that.” But how had it happened? At one moment they had been so close together that no force, no power, would separate them—a word and they had been so far apart that they could not see one another’s eyes.