‘No, no!’ she said, looking up apprehensively. ‘I misled you. It is no interlude to me,—it is tragical. I only meant that from a worldly point of view it is an interlude, which we should try to forget. But the world is not all. You will not go away?’
But he continued drearily, ‘Yes, yes, I see it all; you have enlightened me. It will be hurting your prospects even more than mine, if I stay. Now Sir Blount is dead, you are free again,—may marry where you will, but for this fancy of ours. I’ll leave Welland before harm comes of my staying.’
‘Don’t decide to do a thing so rash!’ she begged, seizing his hand, and looking miserable at the effect of her words. ‘I shall have nobody left in the world to care for! And now I have given you the great telescope, and lent you the column, it would be ungrateful to go away! I was wrong; believe me that I did not mean that it was a mere interlude to me. O if you only knew how very, very far it is from that! It is my doubt of the result to you that makes me speak so slightingly.’
They were now approaching cross-roads, and casually looking up they beheld, thirty or forty yards beyond the crossing, Mr. Torkingham, who was leaning over a gate, his back being towards them. As yet he had not recognized their approach.
The master-passion had already supplanted St. Cleeve’s natural ingenuousness by subtlety.
‘Would it be well for us to meet Mr. Torkingham just now?’ he began.
‘Certainly not,’ she said hastily, and pulling the rein she instantly drove down the right-hand road. ‘I cannot meet anybody!’ she murmured. ‘Would it not be better that you leave me now?—not for my pleasure, but that there may arise no distressing tales about us before we know—how to act in this—this’—(she smiled faintly at him) ‘heartaching extremity!’
They were passing under a huge oak-tree, whose limbs, irregular with shoulders, knuckles, and elbows, stretched horizontally over the lane in a manner recalling Absalom’s death. A slight rustling was perceptible amid the leafage as they drew out from beneath it, and turning up his eyes Swithin saw that very buttoned page whose advent they had dreaded, looking down with interest at them from a perch not much higher than a yard above their heads. He had a bunch of oak-apples in one hand, plainly the object of his climb, and was furtively watching Lady Constantine with the hope that she might not see him. But that she had already done, though she did not reveal it, and, fearing that the latter words of their conversation had been overheard, they spoke not till they had passed the next turning.
She stretched out her hand to his. ‘This must not go on,’ she said imploringly. ‘My anxiety as to what may be said of such methods of meeting makes me too unhappy. See what has happened!’ She could not help smiling. ‘Out of the frying-pan into the fire! After meanly turning to avoid the parson we have rushed into a worse publicity. It is too humiliating to have to avoid people, and lowers both you and me. The only remedy is not to meet.’
‘Very well,’ said Swithin, with a sigh. ‘So it shall be.’