He took up his hat and stick, his eyes meanwhile slowly travelling round the room. It was the morning-room, and opening from the drawing-rooms had often been used in their place as being more cosy after dinner in winter. A little bamboo table with a low chair beside it was hers. How often they had played chess together there, or talked, Cynthia with bright silken work in her hands. It was pain to Mrs. Hennifer to see the sadness of his face. He came up and put his hand out. She took it within both her own and looked at him earnestly, her thin angular figure relaxing sufficiently to lean slightly towards him.
'Canon, it may never be a marriage,' she said.
'Never a marriage!' he repeated. 'Dear Mrs. Hennifer, that would, I fear, be a grief to her.'
'She must have been a little hasty.'
'But haste does not always entail mistake.'
'She may discover that she has not known sufficient about him. He is some years older than she. She may eventually see herself that it is not desirable.'
'True. It is possible.'
'But improbable, you think. It would entail unpleasantness. Still, the breaking off might be a mutual arrangement; it might.'
He was silent again, struggling with the desperate hope that sprang up anew at the suggestion. It took him unawares. He had determined that Cynthia's manner that night should decide the future irrevocably for him. He would fight free of suspense, and suffer no paralysis of indecision. At last he smiled slightly, that smile of a radiance so rarely, softly bright that it fell like a benediction wherever it was bestowed.
'You want to soften things for me,' he said. 'In your goodness of heart, and because you knew her and me as children, and the love that I have had for her since, you do not wish that I should have to bear what is hard. I do find it hard, but I would rather it were a thousand times harder than that sorrow stepped into her path. I love her yet, and shall eternally, but it is and will be with "self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control." Let us pray God that there is no mistake, and if she marry Danby it may be a happy marriage.'