Mr. Bloxam had bowed, and said, “I should be most happy”—and one sees what he meant. “My mother, you know, won’t like it. Naturally she is partial. She will say that you led me on.”
“Then she will say what is very untrue,” cried Mary, with flashing eyes, “and I hope you will tell her so. It is very hard if I may not have friends without being accused of ridiculous things.”
“Girls do them, you know,” said Mr. Bloxam dubiously. “I’ve met with several cases.”
“If you are likely to include this among them, I must ask you to let me go,” she said with spirit; “but perhaps you would like to give me some tea first.”
Mr. Bloxam, murmuring about the sacred rites of hospitality, assured her that he would; and they parted on good terms. He told her that he intended to travel; and indeed he did afterwards go to Weston-super-Mare for a month.
The unfortunate but absurd episode taught her to be circumspect with the literary curate. He, however, was of a more cautious temperament, and went away for his holiday with no more pronounced symptom than a promise to send her picture postcards from the Cathedral cities which he purposed visiting. “You may like to have these afterwards,” he darkly said, and then took himself away on a bicycle.
The year was come to a critical point for her. About this time Halfway House would be plodding its way to the West, its owner, loose-limbed and leisurely, smoking on the tilt. Almost any day now it might pass by Exeter, or through it; almost any day she might come plump upon it—and what was to happen to her then? Could she endure the year’s round, or know him by her Cornish sea, in her white cottage on the cliff, and stay here nursing her wound, feeling the throb and the ache? It seemed impossible—and yet women do such things. It was almost the worst of her plight that she knew she could do it. It was in her blood to do it. The poor were like that: dumb beasts.
And now the delicacy which she had felt at first, and which had kept her away from Land’s End, became a tyrant, as the temptations grew upon her. It prevented her riding afield by any road leading into Exeter from the East. She had a bicycle; more, she had a certain way of bringing him directly to her side. He had taught her. The patteran. But no! She couldn’t. So she worked on doggedly, with the fret and fever in her bones; and day by day October slipped into November; the days slipped off as the wet leaves fell.
Early in November, on a day of sunny weather, Polly Merritt announced a visitor, who followed her immediately into the room, his straw hat under his left arm, his right hand held out.
“A gentleman to see Miss Middleham, if you please,” says Polly Merritt, and Mary had sprung up, with her hand to her side.