‘No, I am speaking English. You will see, even if they don’t tell you, by your people’s looks, or you will get it out of one of your sisters. Mind! if you find that they are all in the dumps, and she feels herself beaten—you’ll see it in their looks—let me know. If I should not be here I will let you know where I am.’
‘Are you going away?’ said Jim.
She did not make him any immediate answer, but turned round upon him, in the light of a lamp which they were approaching, putting back her veil a little, with a mischievous look. ‘Should you be very sorry? No, I’m afraid you would not be very sorry,’ she said.
‘Yes, I should,’ said Jim, with an impetuosity which alarmed him next moment, as he suddenly realised that somebody passing (but there was no one passing), or somebody unseen at a door or window, might hear what he said. ‘I should be very sorry indeed to think I should not see you any more,’ he added, in a lower tone.
‘But that dreadful fate need not come, even if I were to leave Watcham,’ she said, in her mocking tone. ‘We met before I came here, which is the origin of all our acquaintance, and we may meet after I leave here. The world is a wide place. I shall let you know, somehow, where I am: and in the case I have so impressed upon you——’
‘The case in which Aunt Emily (of all people in the world!) should find herself crushed altogether.’
‘You are a good scholar. You have learned your lesson. In that case you will take care—but only when there is no other hope—to let me know. Now I’ll release you, Mr. Jim. I won’t exact that you should come to my very door. No harm can happen to me between this and my door.’
‘It is the only part of the way where anything could happen,’ said Jim. ‘It’s the middle of the town.’
‘A wonderful town, and a wonderful middle,’ she said, laughing. ‘No, nothing will happen. Good night, and I am more obliged to you than I can say.’
Jim stood irresolute, and watched her as she drew down her veil over her face, and hurried along to the door of the schoolhouse. He was, on the whole, well pleased to get rid of her, but he did not like the idea of being thus dismissed at the moment it occurred to her to do so—a sensation which roused his pride and kept him, accordingly, standing where she left him until he saw that she had reached her own door. She turned round there and made a slight gesture of farewell, or dismissal. It was just at that moment that the convives at the ‘Blue Boar’ began to stream out, with a little noise of voices and feet, the last jokes of the little convivial club. Jim turned and hurried homeward, not without an uncomfortable feeling that his return would correspond unpleasingly with the dispersion of that assembly. But yet it was not his fault.