“I understand,” he said, without letting his eyes meet hers—he was stiffness itself, but perhaps he too had his emotions—“that you preferred to see me here rather than indoors?”
“Yes,” Henrietta answered. And the girl thanked heaven that though the beating of her heart had nearly choked her a moment before, her tone was as hard and uncompromising as his. He could not guess, he never should guess, what strain she put on nerve and will that she might not quail before him; nor how often, with her quivering face hidden in the pillow, she had told herself, before rising, that it was for once only, once only, and that then she need never see again the man she had wronged.
“I do not know,” he continued slowly, “whether you have anything to say?”
“Nothing,” she answered. They were standing on the Ambleside road, a short furlong from the inn. Leafless trees climbed the hill-side above them; and a rough slope, unfenced and strewn with boulders and dying bracken, ran down from their feet to the lake.
“Then,” he rejoined, with a scarcely perceptible hardening of the mouth, “I had best say as briefly as possible what I am come to say.”
“If you please,” she said. Hitherto she had faced him regally. Now she averted her eyes ever so slightly, and placed herself so that she looked across the water that gleamed pale under the morning mist.
Yet, even with her eyes turned from him, he did not find it easy to say what he must say. And for a few seconds he was silent. At last “I do not wish to upbraid you,” he began in a voice somewhat lower in tone. “You have done a very foolish and a very wicked, wicked thing, and one which cannot be undone in the eyes of the world. That is for all to see. You have left your home and your friends and your family under circumstances——”
She turned her full face to him suddenly.
“Have they,” she said, “empowered you to speak to me?”
“Yes.”