John accompanied her to the train as he had accompanied her from the train ten days before. It was again night, and to sit by her side during that short drive, which still afforded opportunity for so many things to be said, was about as exciting to him as on the previous occasion; but it was a different kind of excitement. His heart was no longer quivering on the balance between love and opposition. It had taken strongly the latter poise; his very ears seemed to thrill with eagerness to hear every word she said, which his mind instantly construed in a sense offensive to himself. When this impulse seizes upon us, it is astonishing how much bitterness can be extracted from the very simplest phrases. She had no disposition to offend the boy that night. On the contrary, there was in her voice a softness, and in her words a tremulous feeling such as a week since would have gone to John’s heart. She had an appearance of emotion about her altogether which, not even in the moment when they stood together beside the bed of death, had been in her before. And now it was she who was the most ready to speak.
‘It is only now,’ she said, ‘when I am gone, that you will settle down to your changed life—you will only realise it fully now.’
‘Oh! I have realised it,’ said John, ‘since the first day. It will be less strange—less—when grandfather and I are alone.’
‘Less?’ she said, with a question unexpressed, ‘you don’t leave me room to think very much of myself.’
To this he made no reply: and there was the faint quiver of a laugh in the air, which, the speaker’s face being unseen, was more suggestive of pain than any other sound could have been.
‘I need not recommend your grandfather to your care, John. You will be as good to him and watchful of him as you can. He is not so strong as he thinks he is. You will write to me at once, if you see anything to be anxious about.’
‘It didn’t do much good,’ said John, ‘writing to you before.’
‘You did not tell me the true state of the case,’ she said, exercising evident control over herself. ‘You wrote as if it was entirely from yourself——’
‘I know better now,’ he said, bitterly. ‘You may be sure I will never do that again.’
He turned his head away from her, and stared out of the window at the lights in the cottages which skirted the common—lights which twinkled at him many a time afterwards in his dreams.