“So here I am once more—back again among my enemies! Happiness for me, a momentary illusion—hope a cheat. My reality is the blackness of the abyss. God help me!”
He turned up his eyes, and he groaned this prayer, unconscious that it was a prayer.
“I will,” he thought, “extract the sting from this miserable mystery. Between me and Alice it shall be a secret no longer. I’ll tell her to-morrow. I’ll look out an opportunity; I will by——”
And to nail himself to his promise this irresolute man repeated the same passionate oath, and he struck his hand on the table.
Next day, therefore, when Alice was again among the flowers in the garden he entered that antique and solemn shade with a strange sensation at his heart of fear and grief. How would Alice look on him after it was over? How would she bear it?
Pale as the man who walks after the coffin of his darling, between the tall gray piers he entered that wild and umbrageous enclosure.
His heart seemed to stop still as he saw little Alice, all unsuspicious of his dreadful message, working with her tiny trowel at the one sunny spot of the garden.
She stood up—how pretty she was!—looking on her work; and as she stood with one tiny foot advanced, and her arms folded, with her garden-gloves on, and the little diamond-shaped trowel glittering in her hand, she sang low to herself an air which he remembered her singing when she was quite a little thing long ago at Wyvern—when he never dreamed she would be anything to him—just a picture of a little brown-haired girl and nothing dearer.
Then she saw him, and—
“Oh, Ry, darling!” she cried, as making a diagonal from the distant point, she ran towards him through tall trees and old raspberries, and under the boughs of over-grown fruit trees, which now-a-days bore more moss and lichen than pears or cherries upon them.