“Is it always to be war between us, Miss Western?” as if the words could not be kept back. “Heaven knows how glad I should be to leave forever all the painful part of the past.”
Mary slowly shook her head. Then looking up suddenly again, she said, gently:
“We have got on very well here without fighting. Why should not the truce last till the end of the time here? There is only another day.”
“Yes,” repeated Mr Cheviott. “Only one other day.”
Then Mary went off to bed, but not, for much longer than her wont, to sleep. Her mind seemed strangely bewildered and perplexed.
“I have lost all my mile-stones,” she said to herself. “I feel as if I were being forced to think black white in the strangest way. But I won’t—no, I won’t, won’t, won’t!”
And with this laudable determination she went to sleep.
It was late before Mr Cheviott left the kitchen fire-side that night.
“Will the truce last,” he was saying to himself, “even through another day? Twenty times in an hour I have been on the point of saying what, indeed, would end it one way or another. And Arthur thought I could not sympathise with him! I wonder on which of the two of us that idiotic will has entailed the greater suffering?”
His good spirits seemed all to have deserted him by the next morning. He was grave and almost stern, and, so said Alys, “objectionably affairé about some stupid letters sent on from Romary.” Alys was unusually talkative and obtrusively cheerful, but Mary understood her through it all. A cloud of real sorrow was over both girls, more heavily on Mary, for she knew what Alys was still silently determined to hope against, that this was far more than the “last day” of their queer life at the farm, that it was the end of the strange but strong friendship that, despite all obstacles, had sprung up between them.