“Oh ... since!” she said.
“But, my darling Nan, a little way back you forbade me to speak of love to you.”
“Yes, you see,” she said with another sigh, less contented, this one, “I want to have nothing on my conscience, nothing, nothing, nothing—except my thoughts, and I can’t help those.”
“Won’t you tell them to me?”
“If I told them to you, they would be on my conscience, and that’s where I don’t want them to be.”
“You are deplorably logical, when it is for my undoing,” he said, sighing in his turn.
“If I had a laden conscience, I should become a coward. If I became a coward, I should never have the courage to face Gregory,” she said, checking the points off on her fingers. “No, stop: I know what you’re about to say, ‘then you do mean some day to face Gregory.’ I can’t answer that, and you must be patient to let these ten days go by; maybe by the time we’re in the middle of them I will have got back my wits. I’m too scared now to have any wits at all. What is going on in our house now? you know no more than I do, and yet you know just as I do that there is something strange. It’s something between Silas and Gregory. Oh, it’s dreadful to think that there should be something between them which they are working out for themselves, with all their difficulties, because they can’t ask our help, either yours or mine. It frightens me so. Oh, my dear, it’s horrible to be afraid! Linnet, you must take care of me.”
“You don’t give me much chance....”
“No, I know I don’t; I’m bad to you, I know. I seem to turn this way and that for a way out, and things press upon me, and then I make you suffer for it. Put it down that I scarcely know what I’m doing....”
“No, I know you don’t, my pretty, my poor pretty, only tell me about it, if that’s any help, and don’t let things get magnified in your mind bigger than they ought to be; hills look steeper than they are, you know, before one starts going up them.”