“I never thought of it,” said Marjory; “it was nothing; that could not make any difference; but we must go.”
“It is selfish of me to say anything,” he said; “but it is I who must go first—not the same man who came here a month ago, Miss Heriot; just a month—though it might be an hour, or it might be a year. It has separated my life into two pieces. May I write to you after I have managed to take myself away?”
“Surely,” she said, in her gentlest tone.
“And will you write to me? I have no right to ask it; but you are—different, somehow. You know how little I am good for. I don’t mean to make any professions to you now—to say you have made me better. Perhaps I am past making better. I should like to try, first; but if you would write now and then, just three words—”
“Certainly I will write,” she said, looking frankly in his face. “How much you have been to us all this terrible time! Do you think I can ever forget it? And it is not only that we owe you a day in harvest—as we Scotch folk say—but people cannot feel with each other as we have done, and then cease and forget each other. Certainly I will write; it will be one of my pleasures.”
He held her hand tight in his arm; his heart was beating vaguely with many half-formed impulses. But even if anything like love had been ripe in him, it would have seemed profanation at that moment. He only held her hand closer to his side where his heart was stirring so strangely, and said—
“You make me almost happy—if it was possible to be happy in going away. I suppose I shall never come back—absolutely back here, to Pitcomlie; but we shall see each other? It is not a parting, this—only for the moment? say you think so, to cheer me.”
“I hope so!” she said. She was franker, more open than he was; but she was much less agitated. It was to her an easy thing to believe in this future meeting, because she wished for it without any passionate desire. But he longed for assurance, and doubted even while he affirmed; for it seemed to him as if his whole future was dark and uncertain till that moment should come.
“How good it is to hear you say so!” he said. “If you hope for it, it will come to pass. I have not so much faith in my own prayers.”
“Alas! the things I have hoped for have not come to pass,” she said, with a little outburst of sorrow. And then, when her brief fit of weeping was over (he would have liked so to have taken her into his arms, to have had her sob on his breast—but dared not), she looked up to him again with a faint smile. “I have got so used to cry and show you all my weakness,” she said; “how I shall miss you! It is luxury to have some one by who will not be impatient of one’s tears.”