But he shook her off. “No, Katie, I tell you I’m not such a cad. I know what all this means to you, the place, the people, everything. It’s true that I asked you once to go off, but I didn’t love you then as I do now. I was thinking more of myself then—but now I’m ready for anything here. You know that I am. I don’t care if only they let me stay with you.”
“But they won’t,” Katherine urged. “You know what they’ll do. They’ll marry us, they’ll make you take a house near at hand, and if you refuse they’ll persuade you that you’re making me miserable. Oh! Phil! don’t you see—if I were sure of myself I’d never run off like this, but it’s from myself that I’m running. That’s the whole point of everything. I can’t trust myself with Mother. She has as much influence over me as ever she had. I felt it to-day more than I’ve ever felt it. There she is over both of us. You know that you’re weaker with her than I am. It isn’t that she does anything much except sit quiet, but I love her, and it’s through that she gets at both of us. No, Phil, we’ve got to go—and now. If not now, then never. I shan’t be strong enough to-morrow. Don’t you see what she can do in the future, now that she knows about Anna....” Then, almost in a whisper, she brought out: “Don’t you see what Anna can do?”
“No,” he said, “I won’t go. It’s not fair. It’s not—”
“Well,” she answered him, “it doesn’t matter what you do, whether you go or not. I shall go. And what are you to do then?”
She had vanished across the lawn, leaving him standing there. Behind all his perplexity and a certain shame at his inaction, a fire of exultation inflamed him, making him heedless of the rain or the low muttering thunder far away. She loved him! She was freeing him! His glory in her strength, her courage, flew like a burning arrow to his heart, killing the old man in him, striking him to the ground, that old lumbering body giving way before a new creature to whom the whole world was a plain of victory. He stood there trembling with his love for her....
Then he realised that, whatever he did, there was no time to be lost. And after all what was he to do? Did he enter and alarm the family, tell them that Katherine was flying to London, what would he gain but her scorn? How much would he lose to save nothing? Even as he argued with himself some stronger power was dragging him to the house. He was in his room; he had his coat and hat from the hall; he saw no one; he was in the dark garden again, stepping softly through the wicket-gate on to the high road—Then the wind of the approaching storm met him with a scurry of rain that slashed his face. He did not know that now, for the first moment since his leaving Russia, Anna was less to him than nothing. He did not know that he was leaving behind him in that dark rain-swept garden an indignant, a defeated ghost....
Meanwhile Katherine had gone, rapidly, without pause, to her bedroom. She was conscious of nothing until she reached it, and then she stood in the middle of the floor, struck by a sudden, poignant agony of reproach that took, for the moment, all life from her. Her knees were trembling, her heart pounding in her breast, her eyes veiled by some mist that yet allowed her to see with a fiery clarity every detail of the room. They rose and besieged her, the chairs, the photographs, the carpet, the bed, the wash-hand-stand, the pictures, the window with the old, old view of the wall, the church-tower, the crooked apple-tree clustered in a corner, the bed of roses, the flash of the nook beyond the lawn. She covered her eyes with her hand. Everything was still there, crying to her “Don’t leave us! Is our old devotion nothing, our faithful service? Are you, whom we have trusted, false like the rest?”
She swayed then; tears that would never fall burnt her eyes. The first rain lashed her window, and from the trees around the church some flurry of rooks rose, protesting against the coming storm. She drove it all down with a strong hand. She would not listen....
Then, as she found her coat and hat, a figure rose before her, the one figure that, just then, could most easily defeat her. Her Mother she would not see, Millie, Henry, the Aunts could not then touch her. It was her Father.