With head bowed by her mortification of spirit, Stephen rode once more to The Grange. And from time to time as she rode she flushed deeply because of the shame of what she was doing. But from time to time her eyes filled with tears because of the pain of her longing.
She left the cob with a man at the stables, then made her way round to the old herb-garden; and there she found Angela sitting alone in the shade with a book which she was not reading.
Stephen said: ‘I’ve come back.’ And then without waiting: ‘I’ll do anything you want, if you’ll let me come back.’ And even as she spoke those words her eyes fell.
But Angela answered: ‘You had to come back—because I’ve been wanting you, Stephen.’
Then Stephen went and knelt down beside her, and she hid her face against Angela’s knee, and the tears that had never so much as once fallen during all the hard weeks of their separation, gushed out of her eyes. She cried like a child, with her face against Angela’s knee.
Angela let her cry on for a while, then she lifted the tear-stained face and kissed it: ‘Oh, Stephen, Stephen, get used to the world—it’s a horrible place full of horrible people, but it’s all there is, and we live in it, don’t we? So we’ve just got to do as the world does, my Stephen.’ And because it seemed strange and rather pathetic that this creature should weep, Angela was stirred to something very like love for a moment: ‘Don’t cry any more—don’t cry, honey,’ she whispered, ‘we’re together; nothing else really matters.’
And so it began all over again.
5
Stephen stayed on to lunch, for Ralph was in Worcester. He came home a good two hours before teatime to find them together among his roses; they had followed the shade when it left the herb-garden.
‘Oh, it’s you!’ he exclaimed as his eye lit on Stephen; and his voice was so naïvely disappointed, so full of dismay at her reappearance, that just for a second she felt sorry for him.