“Was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He is a fool; without his inheritance, he’d be plowing and hay-making. Why discuss idly and waste time? The dinner gong will sound soon.”
He took out his watch. It was a costly gold hunter, which he had bought in his brief prosperous time. He had put it in her hands only half an hour before his arrest—when Overent and Bladden had flown with forty thousand pounds and he was madly packing his bag in the Bloomsbury back bedroom.
“What am I to do?”
“Get two hundred pounds out of Jethro. I will go away and make my fortune. Some day, when you read the papers—a day old,” he sneered, “you’ll see my name as chairman of a public dinner, or recipient of a testimonial. I mean to be generous—when generosity can be made to pay. I’ll present my district with a public library, a clock tower, or a drinking fountain, and be knighted.”
“You’ll come to Folly Corner sometimes?”
“Never.” Even his honor, just because he was a man, was stronger than hers. “I thought at first that it would work—you as Jethro’s wife, I as Nancy’s husband. But you are one of those emotional women who go to the devil and drag a man with them. When I leave here it will be for good. You won’t even know my address.”
“I couldn’t bear it.”
Her eyes were not on him, but on the lattice. She looked across the great field, with its uplands and its belt of oaks. She had seen it in so many aspects—half shorn; plowed, the wet furrows shining like glass; seen it smoothly iced with January snow; watched the green needle-points of young grain. That outlook, that deep bay window, had known the tearing of her heart.
She looked. The ripeness of harvest was suggested. There were the long stretches of gray-green grain, soon to be golden, soon to rustle with the dry, hot breeze of August. She saw the tossed-up lavish boughs of wild roses wreathing above the hedge-rows, and saw the long grass on the banks, tropical in its growth, and going rapidly to seed.
She couldn’t stay here and watch the changes of the season for years—year after year and then death—without word of him.