"Yes, now," she persisted, deaf to his voice. She snatched up her hood from the ground on which it had fallen, and began to put it on.
He seized her arm. "No, not now," he said firmly. "You shall not go now. Wait until daylight. She will listen to you more coolly then."
She resisted him. "Why?" she said. "Why?"
"People fancy things at night," he urged. "I know it is so. If she saw you enter out of the darkness"—the girl with her burning eyes, her wet cheeks, her disordered hair looked wild enough—"she might refuse to believe you. Besides——"
"What?"
"I will not have you go now," he said firmly. That instant it had flashed upon him that one of the faces he had seen outside was the face of the dead child's mother. "I will not let you go," he repeated. "Go in the daylight. Go to-morrow morning. Go then, if you will!" He did not choose to tell her that he feared for her instant safety if she went now; that, if he had his will, the streets would see her no more for many a day.
She gave way. She took off her hood, and laid it on the table. But for several minutes she stood, brooding darkly and stormily, her hands fingering the strings. To foresee is not always to be forearmed. She had lived for months in daily and hourly expectation of the blow which had fallen; but not the more easily for that could she brook the concrete charge. Her heart burned, her soul was on fire. Justice, give us justice though the heavens fall, is an instinct planted deep in man's nature! Of the Mysterious Passion of our Lord our finite minds find no part worse than the anguish of innocence condemned. A child? She to hurt a child? And her mother? Her mother, so harmless, so ignorant, so tormented! She to hurt a child?
After a time, nevertheless, the storm began to subside. But with it died the hope which is inherent in revolt; in proportion as she grew more calm the forlornness of her situation rose more clearly before her. At last that had happened which she had so long expected to happen. The thing was known. Soon the full consequences would be upon her, the consequences on which she dared not dwell. Shudderingly she tried to close her eyes to the things that might lie before her, to the things at which Grio had hinted, the things of which she had lain thinking—even while they were distant and uncertain—through many a night of bitter fear and fevered anticipation.
They were at hand now, and though she averted her thoughts, she knew it. But the wind is tempered to the shorn. Even as the prospect of future ill can dominate the present, embitter the sweetest cup, and render thorny the softest bed, so, sometimes, present good has the power to obscure the future evil. As Anne sank back on the settle, her trembling limbs almost declining to bear her, her eyes fell on her companion. Failing to rouse her, he had seated himself on the other side of the hearth, his elbows on his knees, his chin on his hands, in an attitude of deep thought. And little by little, as she looked at him, her cheeks grew, if not red, less pale, her eyes lost their tense and hopeless gaze. She heaved a quivering sigh, and slowly carried her look round the room.
Its homely comfort, augmented by the hour and the firelight, seemed to lap them round. The door was locked, the shutters were closed, the lamp burned cheerfully. And he sat opposite—sat as if they had been long married. The colour grew deeper in her face as she gazed; she breathed more quickly; her eyes shone. What evil cannot be softened, what misfortune cannot be lightened to a woman by the knowledge that she is loved by the man she loves? That where all have fled, he remains, and that neither fear of death nor word of man can keep him from her side?