‘I shall not forget it,’ said the captain, ‘but if you tell me to keep silence I will obey. I would do anything rather than live out of your society.’
‘If you ever repeat what you have said this afternoon, our friendship will be ended.’
‘Anything sooner than that.’
He took the little hand again and kissed it tenderly. So there was a kind of compact between them. He was to go on adoring her, but was to say nothing about it.
Captain Standish rode back to Great Yafford in excellent humour. He had considerably embellished the fact of his return, in his conversation with Mrs. Piper. He had come back because the weather had been abominable, and the birds hardly visible behind a dense curtain of driving rain. Three days of such uncomfortable sport had been quite enough for the captain.
‘Poor little thing,’ he mused, as he walked his horse, after a swinging galop over a grassy waste, ‘how very weak she is! I am glad she doesn’t want me to run away with her. It would be uncommonly inconvenient. But when a man has flirted as desperately as I have a woman expects him to say something serious. She’s really very pretty—quite the most fascinating little thing I’ve met for a long time. And if she were single—all things being equal—I don’t think I should object to marry her.’
CHAPTER XIV.
A TURN OF FORTUNE’S WHEEL.
Cyril Culverhouse lived his useful life, full of thought and care for others, honoured, beloved, but with a deep and settled sadness at his heart. He could not forget the woman he loved, he could not forgive himself for having doubted her. Both their lives were blighted by that mistake; and yet, looking back, he knew that he had tried to do his duty. Love seemed a snare of Satan, and he had cut himself free from its meshes. But after that meeting in the churchyard all his doubts vanished, his judgment wavered no longer. There is a power in simple truth, when we meet it face to face, that is stronger than all reasoning upon a chain of possibilities.
He was convinced for ever of her guiltlessness, in the hour when he believed her irrevocably lost to him. Could he ever forget that meeting—that one despairing kiss—the sight of her lying at his feet among the rank grass that grows on graves? And she had confessed her love for him, by flying from a loveless marriage.