‘Don’t read it now,’ he said. ‘Don’t spoil our meeting by entering into a subject which is virtually past and done with. Take it with you, and look it over at your leisure—merely as an old curiosity, remember, and not as a still operative document. I have almost forgotten what the contents are, beyond the general advice and stipulation that I was to remain a bachelor.’
‘At any rate,’ she rejoined, ‘do not reply to the note I have seen from the solicitors till I have read this also.’
He promised. ‘But now about our public wedding,’ he said. ‘Like certain royal personages, we shall have had the religious rite and the civil contract performed on independent occasions. Will you fix the day? When is it to be? and shall it take place at a registrar’s office, since there is no necessity for having the sacred part over again?’
‘I’ll think,’ replied she. ‘I’ll think it over.’
‘And let me know as soon as you can how you decide to proceed.’
‘I will write to-morrow, or come. I do not know what to say now. I cannot forget how I am wronging you. This is almost more than I can bear!’
To divert her mind he began talking about Greenwich Observatory, and the great instruments therein, and how he had been received by the astronomers, and the details of the expedition to observe the Transit of Venus, together with many other subjects of the sort, to which she had not power to lend her attention.
‘I must reach home before the people are out of church,’ she at length said wearily. ‘I wish nobody to know I have been out this morning.’ And forbidding Swithin to cross into the open in her company she left him on the edge of the isolated plantation, which had latterly known her tread so well.
XXXV
Lady Constantine crossed the field and the park beyond, and found on passing the church that the congregation was still within. There was no hurry for getting indoors, the open windows enabling her to hear that Mr. Torkingham had only just given out his text. So instead of entering the house she went through the garden-door to the old bowling-green, and sat down in the arbour that Louis had occupied when he overheard the interview between Swithin and the Bishop. Not until then did she find courage to draw out the letter and papers relating to the bequest, which Swithin in a critical moment had handed to her.