“I don’t believe it!” she cried.
“On his ship in Plymouth Harbour they will tell you differently.”
“I don’t believe it!” she replied, with passion. And then, “How horrid you are!” she continued. “And it is nearly dark! Why do you talk of such things? You are jealous of him—that is what you are!”
He saw the wisdom of sliding back into their old relations, and he seized the opportunity her words offered.
“Yes,” he murmured, “I am jealous of him. And why not? I am jealous of the wind that caresses your cheek, of the carpet that feels your tread, of the star that peeps in at your window! I am jealous of all who come near you, or speak to you, or look at you!”
“Are you really?”—in a tone of childish delight. “As jealous as that?”
He swore it with many phrases.
“And you will be so always?” she sighed softly, leaning towards him. “Always—Alan?”
“To eternity!” he answered. And emboldened by her melting mood, he would have taken her hand, and perhaps more than her hand, but at that moment the lights of the inn at Newby Bridge flashed on them suddenly, the roar of the water as it rushed over the weirs surprised their ears, the postboys cracked their whips, and the carriage bounded and rattled over the steep pitch of the narrow bridge. A second or two later it came to a stand before the inn amid a crowd of helpers and stable lads, whose lanthorns dazzled the travellers’ eyes.
They stayed only to change horses, then were away again. But the halt sufficed to cool his courage; and as they pounded on monotonously through the night, the darkness and the dim distances of river and lake—for they were approaching the shores of Windermere—produced their natural effect on Henrietta’s feelings. She had been travelling since early morning cooped and cramped within the narrow chaise; she had spent the previous night in a fever of suspense and restlessness. Now, though slowly, the gloom, the dark outlines of the woods, and that sense of loneliness which seizes upon all who are flung for the first time among strange surroundings, began to tell upon the spirits even of nineteen. She did not admit the fact to herself—she would have died before she confessed it to another; but disillusion had begun its subtle task.