"Easy, please! What hold should I have on this girl—this splendid creature—if I were merely to make money out of her? As it is, she's obliged to me—she treats me like a gentleman. I thought you had matrimonial ideas."
"I don't believe you've got the ghost of a chance!" grumbled Blaydes, his mind smarting under the thought of the lost four hundred pounds, out of which his debt might have been paid.
"Nor do I," said Lathrop, coolly. "But I choose to keep on equal terms with her. You can sell me up when you like."
He lounged to the window, and threw it open. The January day was closing, not in any glory of sunset, but with interwoven greys and pearls, and delicate yellow lights slipping through the clouds.
"I shall always have this"—he said to himself, passionately, as he drank in the air and the beauty—"whatever happens."
Recollection brought back to him Delia's proud, virginal youth, and her springing step as she walked beside him through the wood. His mind wavered again between triumph and self-disgust. His muddy past returned upon him, mingled, as always, with that invincible respect for her, and belief in something high and unstained in the depths of his own nature, to which his weakened and corrupt will was yet unable to give any effect.
"What I have done is not 'me'"—he thought. "At any rate not all 'me.' I am better than it. I suspect Winnington has told her something—measuring it chastely out. All the same—I shall see her again."
* * * * *
Meanwhile Delia was descending the hill pursued by doubts and terrors. The day was now darkening fast, and heavy snow-clouds were coming down over the valley. The wind had dropped, but the heavy air was bitter-cold and lifeless, as though the earth waited sadly for the silencing and muffling of the snow.
And in Delia's heart there was a like dumb expectancy of change. The old enthusiasms, and ideals and causes, seemed for the moment to lie veiled and frozen within her. Only two figures emerged sharply in the landscape of thought—Gertrude—and Winnington.