“Do you wonder that I cannot forget, and that nothing seems worth while when I know that in those years of seeming happiness I was the companion of a woman whose heart was never mine; who played her part to me, until the child’s death broke the capacity? Whom can I trust after that?”
“I do not think you could have really loved her as you thought,” said Brooke, looking at him simply with deep, quiet conviction in her voice, “for if you had you would have at least understood her. And at the worst I should think you would have flown to work instead of away from it.”
“It may be that you are right,” Stead said, after a long pause, in which the thoughts of both travelled far, but in different directions; “I have a mind to try, but I shall never go away permanently from the River Kingdom. Child, child! how strange it is that your words should have been so long on my lips before ever I met you! Will you wish me luck for a motive, if I go in June?”
“Yes,” answered Brooke, wondering about the time of day, for the shadows had shifted greatly.
“And be glad to see me when I return?”
“Of course,” said Brooke, frankly; then, as other words struggled on Stead’s lips, blocking each other by haste, the pieman’s bell warned her that he had returned and was ready to start. Giving the last apple to Manfred, she freed her hand, stretching it vigorously, for it was almost numb, sent a hasty message to Dr. Russell, and fled out into the open.
Robert Stead waited motionless for several minutes, looking after her; then, shaking himself as a horse does after a period of standing, he led Manfred to the wood road below, and prepared to make up for lost time. Yet for some strange reason he did not give the girl’s message to Dr. Russell, neither did he vouchsafe any explanation of the fact of there being only two trout in his basket, or prate about “fisherman’s luck” when the enthusiastic doctor showed ten beauties bedded in wet moss.
There was enough light left on Brooke’s return for a survey of house, garden, and barns. It is strange when one goes away but seldom, that to find everything in place on the return and people doing as usual comes as a certain surprise. She opened the door of the old harness room to peep at her sketch of the horses. After a careful survey, she said to herself, “It is certainly true that one cannot judge work justly at the time it is done. Yesterday the neck of the young horse seemed all awry, but to-day it has exactly the toss and turn I was striving for.”
As she closed the door she glanced down over the fields, but neither man nor horse was there, only a convocation of crows sitting on the fence. The pieman would doubtless have maintained that they were discussing among themselves the probable location of this season’s corn-fields.