"Well, what do you think of her?" said Tatham, good-humouredly, as he raised his hat to Felicia and his mother disappearing in the car. "She's more alive to-day; but you can see she has been literally starved. That brute Melrose!"
Lydia made some half audible reply, and with a view to prolonging his tête-à-tête with her, he led her strolling along the road, through a golden dusk, touched with moonrise. She followed, but all her pleasant self-confidence with regard to him was gone; she walked beside him, miserable and self-condemned; a theorist defeated by the incalculable forces of things. How to begin with him—what line to take—how to undo her own work—she did not know; her mind was in confusion.
As for him, he was no sooner alone with her than bliss descended on him. He forgot Faversham and the Melroses. He only wished to talk to her, and of himself. Surely, so much, "friendship" allowed.
He began, accordingly, to comment eagerly on her letters to him, and his to her, explaining this, questioning that. Every word showed her afresh that her letters had been the landmarks of his Scotch weeks, the chief events of his summer; and every word quickened a new remorse. At last she could bear it no longer. She broke abruptly on his talk.
"Mayn't I know what's happened at Threlfall? Your mother told me—you had heard."
He pulled himself together, while many things he would rather have forgotten rushed back upon him.
"We're no forrader!" he said impatiently. "I don't believe we shall get a brass farthing out of Melrose, if you ask me; at least without going to law and making a scandal; partly because he's Melrose, and that sort—sooner die than climb down, and the rest of it—but mostly—"
He broke off.
"Mostly?" repeated Lydia.
"I don't know whether I'd better go on. Faversham's a friend of yours."