“Miss Herrick, listen to me one moment!” Philippa continued, speaking so low as almost to be inaudible. “I have something to ask of you, something that you can do for me. It isn’t very much. It isn’t anything that you need suspect. It is a little thing. It’s nothing you could possibly mind.”
“Don’t listen to her, Nance,” cried Linda again. “Don’t listen to her.”
Philippa’s voice trembled as she went on, “I beg you, I beg you on my knees to hear me. We two may never meet again after this. Nance Herrick, will you, will you let me speak?”
Linda leapt forward. She was shaking from head to foot with fear and anger. “No,” she cried, “she shall not listen to you. She shall not, she shall not.”
Nance hesitated, weary and sick at heart. She had so hoped and prayed that all these lacerating contests were over and done with.
Finally she said, “I think you must see, you must feel, that between you and me there can be nothing—nothing more—nothing further. I think you’ll be wise, I think you’ll recognize it afterwards, to let me go now, to let me go and leave us alone.” As she spoke she drew away from her and put her arm round Linda’s waist. “In any case,” she added, “I can’t possibly hear you before this child. Perhaps, but I can’t promise anything, but perhaps, some other day, when I’m by myself.”
She gave one sad, half-sympathetic, half-reproachful glance, at the frail shadowy figure standing mute and silent; and then turning quickly, let herself be led away.
Linda swung round when they were some few paces away. “She’ll never listen to you!” She called out, in a shrill vibrating voice, “I won’t ever let her listen to you.”
The growing darkness, made thicker by the river-mists, closed in between them, and in a brief while their very footsteps ceased to be heard. Philippa was left alone. She looked round her. On the fen side of the pathway there was nothing but a thick fluctuating shadow, out of which the forms of a few pollard-willows rose like panic-stricken ghosts. On the river itself there shimmered at intervals a faint whitish gleam as if some lingering relics of the vanished day, slow in their drowning, struggled to rise to the surface.
She moved back again to the place where she had been standing at the edge of the weir. Leaning upon the time-worn plank rotten with autumn rains, she gazed down into the dense blackness beneath. Nothing could be seen but darkness. She might have been looking down into some unfathomable pit, leading to the caverns of the mid-earth.