"Yes. Of course I will." It seemed a long, long time since he had asked her to do anything—with him.
They went out into the little hall. As he helped her on with her coat, she made a slight shrinking movement which cut him shrewdly; he reminded himself that she had the right to hate, as well as to despise, him.
With common consent they turned into the lonely country road, instead of under the beeches of Rede Place, and as they walked, each kept rather further from the other than do most people walking side by side. Jane respected his moody silence, and her memory went back to the first walk he and she had taken together on the day of his triumphant return home.
It had been a clear starry London night in autumn, and they had crossed from the shabby, quiet little street where she lived to that portion of the Embankment which lies between the river and St. Thomas's Hospital,—a stone-flagged pavement open only to walkers.
There Lingard had linked his arm through hers, and the movement had given her a delicious thrill of joy, deepening in her that protective instinct which makes every woman long for the man she loves to cling to her.
As they had paced up and down, so happily alone in the peopled solitude London offers to her lovers, Jane's tender heart could not forget what lay so near, and she had compared her blest lot with that meted out to the suffering and the forlorn, who lie in their serried ranks in the wards she so often visited.
How gladly now she would have changed places with the one among them who was nearest to death.
They were close to the Rectory gate, and Jane suddenly remembered that Lingard had promised to go in and see Mrs. Kaye this morning. She had forced herself to ask him to do so, and she remembered now that he had assented to her wish with almost painful eagerness. Perhaps he thought she meant him to go there with her. That would explain his coming to the Farm so early.
"Mr. Maule asked me to come to you," he said at last, breaking the long oppressive silence. "He thought—God knows why he thought it!—that a certain terrible thing which has happened—which happened last night—would reach you best from me."
"Something which happened last night?" Jane repeated in a low voice. "I know it already. Athena wrote to me."