He turned a look upon her. “You are not—making a mock of it?” he said.
“I am not making a mock of it.”
“My aunt now writes to me that Miss Christie’s home has been broken up by the death of her mother, and that if it can be arranged she is willing to come to me here. My aunt talks of bringing her. I am to write.”
He said the last words slowly, as if he weighed them. They had passed the turning to the Murchisons’, walking on with the single consciousness of a path under them, and space before them. Once or twice before that had happened, but Advena had always been aware. This time she did not know.
“You are to write,” she said. She sought in vain for more words; he also, throwing back his head, appeared to search the firmament for phrases without result. Silence seemed enforced between them, and walked with them, on into the murky landscape, over the fallen leaves. Passing a streetlamp, they quickened their steps, looking furtively at the light, which seemed leagued against them with silence.
“It seems so extraordinarily—far away,” said Hugh Finlay, of Bross, Dumfries, at length.
“But it will come near,” Advena replied.
“I don’t think it ever can.”
She looked at him with a sudden leap of the heart, a wild, sweet dismay.
“They, of course, will come. But the life of which they are a part, and the man whom I remember to have been me—there is a gulf fixed—”