She put her hands in his. “I am trusting you,” she said, “with all my life. Don’t make a muddle of it, dear, if you can help it.”
It was an odd wooing, as Tommy laughingly told herself when she came to think it over in her room that night. But that is how it shaped itself.
What troubled her most was that he had not been quite frank with Peter, so that Peter had to defend her against herself.
“I attacked you so suddenly,” explained Peter, “you had not time to think. You acted from instinct. A woman seeks to hide her love even from herself.”
“I expect, after all, I am more of a girl than a boy,” feared Tommy: “I seem to have so many womanish failings.”
Peter took himself into quite places and trained himself to face the fact that another would be more to her than he had ever been, and Clodd went about his work like a bear with a sore head; but they neither of them need have troubled themselves so much. The marriage did not take place till nearly fifteen years had passed away, and much water had to flow beneath old London Bridge before that day.
The past is not easily got rid of. A tale was once written of a woman who killed her babe and buried it in a lonely wood, and later stole back in the night and saw there, white in the moonlight, a child’s hand calling through the earth, and buried it again and yet again; but always that white baby hand called upwards through the earth, trample it down as she would. Tommy read the story one evening in an old miscellany, and sat long before the dead fire, the book open on her lap, and shivered; for now she knew the fear that had been haunting her.
Tommy lived expecting her. She came one night when Tommy was alone, working late in the office. Tommy knew her the moment she entered the door, a handsome woman, with snake-like, rustling skirts. She closed the door behind her, and drawing forward a chair, seated herself the other side of the desk, and the two looked long and anxiously at one another.
“They told me I should find you here alone,” said the woman. “It is better, is it not?”
“Yes,” said Tommy, “it is better.”