The walk of to-night was a repetition of the walks that had preceded it; the talk a little more intimate and a little more personal in tone than any of its predecessors, as that of each of the latter in its turn had been.
In the course of the day something had occurred to remind Clemence of her father and her father’s old home, and in intervals of Julian’s talk about himself, she told him a good deal about her thoughts of that little country place; of how there had been Brymers here for generations and generations.
“You must have been Puritans once,” said Julian, laughing, as he often laughed, at some little grave turn of her speech as he looked into the sweet, serious face. Work-girl as she was, she seemed to have acquired neither the talk nor the voice of her kind. The simple form of her words, her accent, and her gentle voice, seemed to belong to a past, quiet and full of a modest dignity of which the London of the nineteenth century hardly knows. “You would have made an awfully jolly little Puritan, Clemence!”
“I don’t know,” she said simply; “I was so little when father died. But he felt it dreadfully, I’ve heard, when he came to London; it nearly broke his heart.”
“Why did he do it, then?” said Julian lightly.
“He thought he ought,” returned the girl. “You see, there was nothing to do at Feldbourne—nothing but ploughing, and country things, you know. And father thought a man ought to do something—that everything was meant to go on and get better, you know—and that every man ought to help, ought to work. So, of course, he was obliged to come, you see.”
They had come to the end of the road now, where they always said good night, and as she spoke she was standing still, looking simply into his face. He looked at her for a moment with something in his eyes which seemed to be struggling vaguely into life side by side with the careless mockery of his “set.”
“He was obliged to come, because he thought he ought,” he said. “Do you always do what you think you ought, Clemence?”
“I try,” she said simply. “Every one tries, I suppose.”
He laughed—the laugh that was so like his mother’s—but not quite so freely as usual, and held out his hand.