"Was it? I dare say! I dare say!" he says, soothingly.
"You shall not leave me behind," say I, still weeping with stormy bitterness. "I will not be left behind! What business have you to go without me? Am I to be only a fair-weather wife to you? to go shares in all your pleasant things, and then—when any thing hard or disagreeable comes—to be left out. I tell you" (looking up at him with streaming eyes) "that I will not! I WILL NOT!"
"My darling!" he says, looking most thoroughly concerned, I do not fancy that crying women have formed a large part of his life-experience—"you misunderstand me! I will own to you, that five minutes ago I did you an injustice; but now I know, I am thoroughly convinced, that you would follow me without a murmur or a sulky look to the world's end—and" (laughing) "be frightfully sea-sick all the way; but" (kindly patting my heaving shoulder) "do you think that I want to be hampered with a little invalid? and, supposing that I took you with me, whom should I have to look after things at Tempest, and keep them straight for me against I come home?"
"I know what it is," I cry, passionately clinging round his neck, "you think I do not like you! I see it! twenty times a day, in a hundred things that you do and leave undone! but indeed, indeed, you never were more mistaken in all your life! I will own to you that I did not care very much about you at first. I thought you good, and kind, and excellent, but I was not fond of you; but now, every day, every hour that I live, I like you better! Ask Barbara, ask the boys if I do not! I like you ten thousand times better than I did the day I married you!"
"Like me!" he repeats a little dreamily, looking with a strong and bitter yearning into my eyes; then, seeing that I am going to asseverate, "for God's sake, child," he says, hastily, "do not tell me that you love me, for I know it is not true! you can no more help it than I can help caring for you in the idiotic, mad way, that I do! Perhaps, on some blessed, far-off day, you may be able to say so, and I to believe it, but not now!—not now!"
CHAPTER XX.
With feet as heavy and slowly-dragging as those of some unwieldy old person, with drooped figure, and stained and swollen face, I enter the school-room an hour later to tell my ill-news.
"Enter a young mourner!" says Algy, facetiously, in unkind allusion to the gloom of my appearance, which is perhaps heightened by the black-silk gown I wear.