‘I am sure I don’t want to go travelling with this strange man—carried off as if I had done something wrong,’ said Avice, less and less charmed with the prospect.
‘If you have to go, I shall see that you do not go alone,’ was all Sara could answer. She could eat no more. She rose from her chair. Leaving Avice with the letter, to follow her own devices, she retired to her atelier, and there tried to reason it all out, and comprehend it—and failed. It grew more inexplicable, and more horrible, the more thought she gave to it, until at last an idea flashed into her mind, which left her cold and trembling and miserable, with a misery such as she had never known before. Had any change come over him?—did he love her less? She laughed at it, put it aside, argued it away, and at last did attain to a pretty certain conviction that she was wrong; but the misery remained. It was there, like a dead, leaden weight at her heart. She might argue away her first impression—the first subtle intrusion of the idea, or the shadow or the ghost of the idea, false, but she could not get rid of the wretchedness caused by the fact that the idea had intruded—that something had happened so strange as to open the door for it to enter by.
She tried to paint, but could not. She passed a morning of misery—heavy, unrelieved, and indescribable. When she returned to Avice, she found her too dejected, puzzled, unhappy.
‘I don’t want to go,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what Jerome means, or wants. If I go to England, he ought to come and fetch me.’
He had said no word of coming, as Sara remembered, with a heartache.
‘He wrote in haste, and promised to let us hear again,’ she replied. ‘There is sure to be a letter to-morrow explaining.’
‘I don’t see how it is to be explained,’ said Avice, despondently. ‘But if Jerome thinks he can tyrannise over me, he is mistaken.’
Her lips closed one upon the other with an expression of obstinacy.
‘Hush! as if he had any thought of such a thing!’ said Sara, coldly; but this exchange of ideas had not resulted in lightening the heart of either one or the other of them.