“No,” breathlessly.
“Don’t you think——?”
In the determination to master a tongue restive to such utterance, Lavinia pronounces her words with a clear incisiveness that, even at this crucial moment, makes Mrs. Darcy gauge apprehensively the distance that parts the tragedy in which she is taking part from the tranquil prose of the gardener potting cuttings under a shed.
“Don’t you think it might strike Captain Binning that he has done them almost enough harm already?”
“Don’t speak quite so loud!” in quick-breathing entreaty. “You mean about Bill?”
“Mightn’t it occur to him that, having robbed them of Bill, it would not be behaving very handsomely to rob them of me too?”
The rector’s wife shakes her head mournfully. “Isn’t it a little late to think of that? He has done that already!”
“What has he done?” asks Lavinia, standing at bay, with a fierce white face of dogged championship. “What do you lay to his charge? Once he kissed my hand,—it was this one,” smiting it with the fore finger of the other; “but it was only to thank me for nursing him. That was his one crime! That was all he has ever done—all he ever will do!” In her breaking voice, in her passion-pinched face, there is but little attempt to disguise the poignancy of the smart that the belief in that reticence brings with it.
“Not even if he comes to bid you good-bye?”
Lavinia’s eyes, awhile ago so dead, light up ominously.