This point-blank query unmistakably confused her, and it was not till a minute or more had elapsed that she said, “I have not seriously thought of any such subject.”
“I quite understand that. Yet your late husband has been dead nearly one year, and—”
“You forget that his death was never absolutely proved, and may not have taken place; so that I may not be really a widow,” she said, catching at the straw of escape that the fact afforded.
“Not absolutely proved, perhaps, but it was proved circumstantially. A man saw him drowning, too. No reasonable person has any doubt of his death; nor have you, ma’am, I should imagine.”
“I have none now, or I should have acted differently,” she said, gently. “I certainly, at first, had a strange unaccountable feeling that he could not have perished, but I have been able to explain that in several ways since. But though I am fully persuaded that I shall see him no more, I am far from thinking of marriage with another. I should be very contemptible to indulge in such a thought.”
They were silent now awhile, and having struck into an unfrequented track across a common, the creaks of Boldwood’s saddle and her gig springs were all the sounds to be heard. Boldwood ended the pause.
“Do you remember when I carried you fainting in my arms into the King’s Arms, in Casterbridge? Every dog has his day: that was mine.”
“I know—I know it all,” she said, hurriedly.
“I, for one, shall never cease regretting that events so fell out as to deny you to me.”
“I, too, am very sorry,” she said, and then checked herself. “I mean, you know, I am sorry you thought I—”