"Miss Stanburne," he said, after a pause, "this conversation is leading to no good. It is useless to prolong it."
"I quite agree with you."
And he was gone.
If he could have seen what passed after his departure, he would have gone back to Shayton in a very different frame of mind. Edith had acted her part and held out bravely to the last, but when Jacob was once fairly out of the house, the faithful heart could endure its self-inflicted torture no longer, and she ran upstairs to her bedroom and locked the door, and burst into bitter tears. "How good and brave he is, and how he loves me! It is hard, it is very hard, to have to throw away a heart like his. But I will not be his ruin—I never will be his ruin!" Then a thousand tender recollections came into her memory—recollections of the long years of his faithful love and service. It had begun in their childhood, when first she called him "Charley," giving him one of her own names; it had continued year after year until this very day, when he would have sacrificed all for her, and she had treated him with coldness and cruelty—she who so loved him! And to think that he would never know the truth—that the long dreary future would wear itself gradually out until both of them were in their graves, and that he would never know how her heart yearned to him, and remained faithful to him always! That thought was the hardest and bitterest of them all, that he would never know; that all his life he would retain that misconception about her which she herself had so carefully created! It is easy to bear the bad opinion of people we care nothing about, but when those we most love disapprove, how eagerly we desire their absolution!
Edith was not quite so strong as she herself believed. The late events had tried her courage to the utmost, and outwardly she seemed to have borne them well; but they had strained her nervous system a good deal, and this last trial of her fortitude had been too much, even for her. Her agony rapidly passed from mental grief into an uncontrollable crisis of the nerves. She went through this alone, lying upon her bed, sobbing and moaning, her face on the pillow, her hands convulsively agitated. Then came utter vacancy, and after the vacancy a slow, painful awakening to the new sadness of her life.
CHAPTER XII.
JACOB OGDEN'S TRIUMPH.
At length the great day arrived, towards the end of October, when the new road from Shayton to Wenderholme was to be solemnly inaugurated.