Very tenderly he talked to her, but it was of no use. Very earnestly he pleaded that he had affection enough and to spare for both. Phemie was resolute.
“You are worthy a better fate,” she said. “I have done harm enough in my life, let me be fair and true and honest now.”
And she was all these, though it may have been that for the moment she felt tempted to flee from the awful loneliness of her purposeless existence—from the cold selfishness of the world to the warmth and the welcome of his love.
But it was not to be—it was never to be. She had toiled for her wages in the years which were gone, and her wages were now being paid to her by no niggardly hand.
That which we contract for we must fulfil—that which we agree blindly, or with our eyes open, to receive, we must content ourselves withal.
“The wages of sin is death.” She had sinned, and death fell on every blade of grass near her—on every shrub—on every flower.
It was the summer time, and a great longing came over her to see the hills and the mountains and the valleys and the wild dale country once more.
“I should like to go to Cumberland for a month,” she said, one day; and accordingly she and her uncle and Helen set forth together on that long northern journey which wearied Phemie even before she reached the old “Salutation” Inn, which has greeted so many a tourist entering the Lake District.
But, spite of her weariness, she could not rest in the hotel. Tired and exhausted, Helen went off to bed, while Mr. Aggland and his niece walked along the road which leads from Ambleside to Rydal.
They walked in silence; he was busy with his thoughts, she with hers. They had come back to the old country again, though not to the old place. They had crossed the frontier and passed out of the flat, rich southern lands into the lake district, where mountains rose to the sky and streams came down the hill sides; and the traveller, wandering solitary over the fells, heard the plash of distant waterfalls alone breaking the desolate silence.