“Yes, I tell you—yes!” laughed back Adeline, impudently. “There; you didn’t expect that, did you? There’s pleasant news for my lady so proud! Take Miss Adeline’s leavings, do!”
The man, who had stood watching them, stumbled forward.
“Go in, d’ye hear?” he said, roughly, “or I’ll give you another taste of yesterday’s dinner.” He turned to Ursula with a leer he intended for a smile. “You must forgive her, Mevrouw,” he said, bowing. “She’s a bit fantastical, as I said, but I know how to manage her. I hope that Mevrouw will kindly remember the arrangement she has just made with myself.”
CHAPTER XLVIII
A WIFE FOR GERARD
Ursula walked back through the darkening fields. She knew herself now to be safe, yet she hung as one trembling in the recoil from the flash across a sudden abyss. Supposing she had discovered that these horrible creatures held her in their power? Would she have flung herself down into degradation unspeakable? She hoped not; she trusted not. Yet the oppression of wrong-doing was upon her, the fatal closing of successive links, the terror of the “might have been.”
Then every other reflection died away, and one thought only spread large in falling shadows across the clear blue sky.
How greatly had she wronged Gerard through all the silent years! It was but a single point—this question of Adeline’s ruin; it was “no business of Ursula’s”—oh, pure sisters of the impure!—yet how deeply had it influenced her womanly heart in all her thoughts of him! She could understand, in her own pride, his haughty shrinking from self-assertion before the bar of her complacency. How many err as he! How few make good their error! She saw things more calmly now than in that ignorant girlhood which seemed to lie so far behind her. Her thoughts dwelt sweetly on the companion of her childhood; his happy, noisy youth, his early manhood, now so steadfast in its slow endurance. And her strong eyes grew dim beneath the dying day.