‘Give yourself another week to think it over, for my sake. All this has been so strange and so sudden that you have not had time to think it out. For my sake, reflect.’
She held the letter over the lamp and looked at him for his answer; he hung down his head in silence, and, taking the attitude for acquiescence, she suffered the paper to reach the flame, and in a few seconds it was consumed.
‘Good night!’ she said. ‘I must go now.’
‘Good night! and God bless you, Alma!’ They parted without one kiss or embrace, but, holding each other’s hands, they looked long and tenderly into each other’s faces. Then Alma went as she came, slipping quietly away into the night. But no sooner had she left the vicarage than all her self-command forsook her, and she wept hysterically under cover of the darkness.
‘Yes, his God is my God,’ she murmured to herself. ‘May He give me strength to bear this sorrow, and keep us together till the end!’
CHAPTER IX.—FAREWELL TO FENSEA.
I am sick of time serving. I was borne in the land of Mother-Nakedness; she who bare me was a true woman, and my father was sworn vassal to King Candour, ere he died of a sunstroke; but villains robbed me of my birthright, and I was sent to serve as a mercenary in the army of old Hypocrisy, whom all men now hail Emperor and Pope. Now my armour is rotten, my sword is broken, and I shall never fight more. Heigho! I would I were sleeping under a green tree, in the land where the light shines, and there is no lying!—The Comedy of Counterfeits.
After that night’s parting the lovers did not meet for several days. Bradley went gloomily about his parochial duties, and when he was not so engaged he was shut up in his study, engaged in correspondence or gloomy contemplation. Alma did not seek him out again, for the very simple reason that the nervous shock she had received had seriously affected her generally robust health, and brought on a sort of feverish hysteria complicated with sleeplessness, so that she kept her room for some days, finding a homely nurse in Miss Combe. When Sunday came she was too unwell to go to church.