“It was. And if I were to explain to you in what way that operated in parting us, I should convince you that you do quite wrong in intruding upon her—that, as I said at first, your labour will be lost. I don’t choose to explain, because the particulars are painful. But if you won’t listen to me, go on, for Heaven’s sake. I don’t care what you do, my boy.”
“You have no right to domineer over me as you do. Just because, when I was a lad, I was accustomed to look up to you as a master, and you helped me a little, for which I was grateful to you and have loved you, you assume too much now, and step in before me. It is cruel—it is unjust—of you to injure me so!”
Knight showed himself keenly hurt at this. “Stephen, those words are untrue and unworthy of any man, and they are unworthy of you. You know you wrong me. If you have ever profited by any instruction of mine, I am only too glad to know it. You know it was given ungrudgingly, and that I have never once looked upon it as making you in any way a debtor to me.”
Stephen’s naturally gentle nature was touched, and it was in a troubled voice that he said, “Yes, yes. I am unjust in that—I own it.”
“This is St. Launce’s Station, I think. Are you going to get out?”
Knight’s manner of returning to the matter in hand drew Stephen again into himself. “No; I told you I was going to Endelstow,” he resolutely replied.
Knight’s features became impassive, and he said no more. The train continued rattling on, and Stephen leant back in his corner and closed his eyes. The yellows of evening had turned to browns, the dusky shades thickened, and a flying cloud of dust occasionally stroked the window—borne upon a chilling breeze which blew from the north-east. The previously gilded but now dreary hills began to lose their daylight aspects of rotundity, and to become black discs vandyked against the sky, all nature wearing the cloak that six o’clock casts over the landscape at this time of the year.
Stephen started up in bewilderment after a long stillness, and it was some time before he recollected himself.
“Well, how real, how real!” he exclaimed, brushing his hand across his eyes.
“What is?” said Knight.