‘Unless I may—come back,’ he said. ‘I must go home and put things in order—but it need not be for very long—if I may come back?’
There was something vaguely defective in these words, she could not tell what. For that very reason they relieved her, because they were not what they might have been. She came to herself as if she had touched the earth after that vague swaying, floating, in realms above the earth, in the soft delicious air.
‘Surely,’ she said, ‘you will come back. There is no reason for not coming back.’
He, it seemed, had not felt that touch of reality which had brought Joyce out of her rapture. He was confused and floating still. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘not to return merely to town or—but to come back to this moment, to those days. I have never known anything like them. They have opened a new world to me: Joyce——’
‘Captain Bellendean!’
‘I mean no familiarity—no want of respect; could you think so? The name came out without intention—only because I say it over, and over—— Joyce—I may come back?’
Surely the passers-by must see! He had turned and was looking at her with pleading eyes; while she, with the red of the western sky in her face, with the mist in her eyes, did not look at him, or make him any reply.
‘I don’t ask you to say more. This is not the place. I don’t want to disturb your mind,—only say I may come, and that you will not send me away?’
Her heart had sprung up and was beating loud. A terror of what the people on the road would think took possession of her. ‘No, it is not the place,’ she murmured, scarcely knowing what she said.
‘What could I do? there was no other: say I may——’