Her offer has been incalculably difficult to make, and its refusal ought to bring her some relief; yet the mournful magnanimity of that refusal crushes her. She struggles weakly to crawl from under its weight.
“Though you will not listen to my explanation, you will take my word that I have not done anything absolutely disgraceful!”
He gives a sort of shiver, the kind of gesture of disgust—only a million times intensified—that she has formerly seen him make at any instance of glaring bad taste in art, literature, or manners.
“Yes, I take your word! Only”—with that shudder in his voice—“don’t say that you are sorry, and that you won’t do it again!”
She bows her head in profound humiliation, accepting that stinging chastisement as so much less than her due; while at the same moment a contradictory flash of repulsion from him for being able at such a moment to see the æsthetic side of the situation whizzes through her consciousness. Between them they have slain all talk that can be possible at such a moment. Incapable of thought, her brain a caldron of boiling miseries, Lavinia sets one foot before the other, plodding blindly on; while Rupert—she has never possessed the plate-glass window into his soul, which he has always had into hers, so that what memories, projects, torments, occupy his mind during that last half-hour she never knows.
The sound of a church clock rouses both—her from amid her steam of boiling vapours; him from his unread thoughts. They have reached a part of the road where the railway runs parallel to it, and a gate, faced by another on the opposite side, gives entrance to the line. They pause to listen and count, impatient of the interval between the deliberate strokes.
“Seven! Surely it can’t be seven! He will put himself into a fever if we are late.”
Man and girl look at each other in shocked surprise, their own calamities for the moment entirely sponged off their memories.
“And—is it possible?” throwing an astonished glance of apprehension around—“we are close to Rivers Sutton! It will take us quite an hour to get home.”
“Not if we run along the line!” The shot-out suggestion is Lavinia’s.