She listens dully, so dazed with pain as to feel that he must be talking of some one else.
“And if it were not got rid of,” she foggily hears him continue, “it would, of course, shut up any possible avenue to future happiness for you.”
At that her great anguish breaks through the merciful fog that has begun to envelop it.
“There is no such avenue!” she answers thickly.
He glances at her with what looks like compassion. “You think so now, but you will not think so always.”
“Always! always!” she repeats choking.
He shakes his head as one knowing better. “I am afraid your plan will not hold water,” he rejoins, not irritating her by any spoken contradiction of her asseveration of perpetual woe. “We must think of something more feasible.”
His voice is so coolly dispassionate that once again, and for the last time in both their lives, the balm-bringing idea flashes across her that he does not care much after all—that his finicking womanish nature is incapable of the pangs of a great thwarted passion. But one glance at the profile beside her in the lined patience of its self-government, knocks the unworthy prop from under her self-esteem.
They cover almost a mile in total silence; two miserable blots on the sweet pageant of evening. They meet a herd of cows returning to their juicy pasture after milking, straggling over the road, snatching mouthfuls out of the lush hedge-rows; a few children loiteringly picking flowers, and wastefully tossing them away, with the prodigal cruelty of Mother Nature herself; a farm servant tittering over a gate with a ploughboy. Married birds sing the joys of the nest and the family, and one blackbird seems to keep pace with them as they go, merely to mock them with his liquid telling that, as his Creator had done, he finds his world of the hedge and the pasture and the new green tree very good. Both Rupert and Lavinia are dully sensible of the jar with the surrounding happy suavities that Lavinia’s resumption of the conversation brings with it.
“Can you suggest anything better? You must remember how short a time we have.”