All at once the tone had ceased to be that of a lovers’ interview. Anne, startled and offended, this time succeeded in drawing her hand out of his.
‘Yes,’ she said, with a chill of surprise in her voice, ‘entirely in his hands.’
What was going to follow? Under the great beechen boughs, through the warm summer sunshine there seemed all at once to breathe a wintry gale which penetrated to the heart.
This sudden cloud was dissipated in a moment by another laugh, which rang almost too loudly among the trees. ‘Well,’ he said, drawing her arm through his again, and holding the reluctant hand clasped fast, ‘what of that? Because you are in his hands, Anne, my own, do you think I am going to let you slip out of mine?’
The sun grew warm again, and the air delicious as before. Two on one side, and all the world on the other, is not that a perfectly fair division? So long as there are two—if there should come to be but one, then the aspect of everything is changed. Anne’s hands clasped between two bigger ones all but disappeared from view. It would be hard, very hard, to slip out of that hold; and it was a minute or two before she regained possession of what Cosmo had called the vulgarer symbols, words. Without recurrence to their aid between people who love each other, how much can be said!
‘That is all very well,’ said Anne, at last; ‘but whatever we may do or say we must come back to this: My father has promised to disinherit me, Cosmo, and he will not go back from his word.’
‘Disinherit! the very word sounds romantic. Are we in a novel or are we not? I thought disinherit was only a word for the stage.’
‘But you know this is mere levity,’ said Anne. She smiled in spite of herself. It pleased her to the bottom of her heart that he should take it so lightly, that he should refuse to be frightened by it. ‘We are not boy and girl,’ she said, with delightful gravity of reproof. ‘We must think seriously of a thing which affects our interests so much. The question is, what is to be done?’
Had she but known how keenly under his levity he was discussing that question within himself! But he went on, still half laughing as if it were the best joke in the world.
‘The only thing, so far as I can see, that is not to be done,’ he said, ‘is to obey papa and give me up.’