"I am so glad to have seen this," she said with unconscious pathos. "It has done me good. The thought of all that life and energy, here where even the memory has passed away, the quiet to which it has gone back—the disappearance of the great road, have brought home to me what a little thing one human life is. We walk in a vain shadow and disquiet ourselves in vain. I mean suffering, and being what we call unhappy, matters so little when you think how soon it will be over. That helps one to bear things."
Her eyes, misty with regret, were fixed upon the amphitheatre of rolling downs and on the green, rabbit-run turf, where once the busy highway swarmed with traffic.
He leaned towards her and spoke softly. "Thank you, dear, for trying to comfort me. I am trying to bear things, as you put it—I truly am. Most particularly because I know they are all my own fault. But I have to own that your thought brings me very little comfort. Here are you and here am I, alive and warm, wanting to enjoy our little day. The knowledge that, five centuries hence, nobody will ever have heard our names, does nothing to still my craving."
She looked at him dumbly, and her lip quivered.
"You didn't surely mean—you can't have meant that it is you—you who have to bear things?" he added in a hurried, choky whisper.
For the first time he saw panic in her eyes. She was staring into his as though fascinated. He could almost see the hasty clutch of her will upon her tongue, to prevent her making any admission. "Nobody," she said, almost inaudibly, "has more to bear than they deserve—more than they can carry; but every one has something—something, don't you think?"
He mercilessly held her gaze. "If I were to tell you what I think of you," he began; and she made a little motion with her hand.
"No, don't. Please don't. Because it really does comfort me to feel that I am only a grain of sand upon the shore of time, and that soon I shall be swept away. Only one thing matters, and that is, to have done one's best while one was here. Sometimes it seems hard, but one has to go on, one has to keep on trying. Don't you agree—oh, you must agree—that everybody has something to bear?"
"I think," he muttered savagely, "that you have always been made to bear too much. All the burdens of the whole family have rested on your little, tender shoulders. It is time that you were freed——"
"No," she cried quickly, sharply, "that is the one thing I can never be! I have tied myself, and no human power can release me now."