"Margaret would have loved you," he liked to say. Lizzie was not so sure.
Then suddenly came the afternoon, for days past now inevitable, when he asked her to marry him.
They were sitting together in the Horton flat. It was a day of intense heat. All the windows were wide open, the blinds down, and into the dim, grey shadowy air there struck shafts and lines of heat, bringing with them a smell of dust and pavements. The roses in a large yellow bowl on the centre table flung their thick scent across the dusky mote-threaded light. The hot town lay below them like a still sea basking at the foot of their rock.
"I want you to marry me, Lizzie," he said. "It may seem very soon after Margaret's death, but it's what she would have wished, I know. Please, please don't refuse me. I don't know how I have the impertinence to ask, but I must. I can't help myself——"
At his words the happiness that had filled her heart during the last fortnight suddenly left her, as water ebbs out of a pool. She felt guilty, wicked, ashamed. She had never before been so aware of his helplessness and also of some strange, reproaching voice that blamed her. Why should she be blamed? She looked at him and longed to take his head in her hands and kiss him and keep him beside her and never let him go again.
At last she told him that she would give him her answer the next day.
When at last he left her, she was miserable, weighted with a sense of some horrible crime. And yet why? What was there against such a marriage? She was pursued that evening, that night. Next day she would not see him, but sent down word that she was unwell and would he come to-morrow? All that day, keeping alone in her flat, feeling the waves of heat beat about her, tired, exhausted, driven, the whole of her life stole past her.
"Why should I not marry him? Why must I not marry him?"
The consciousness that she was fighting somebody or something grew with her through the day. Towards evening, when the heat faded and dusk swallowed the colours and patterns of her room, she seemed to hear a voice: "You are not the wife for him. He will have no freedom. He will lose his character. He will become a shadow."
And her answer was almost spoken to the still and empty room. "But he will be happy. I will give him everything. Why may I not think of myself at last after all these years? I've waited and waited, and worked and worked...."