Proper observances! How coldly the words struck upon me!
'Shall you not come down once, Philip?' I murmured.
'Once? O yes, of course; and—you can give me any little commission by letter, you know.'
Then looking at his watch, he found that he might catch the eight o'clock train, and hastily bade me good-night; asking me to excuse him at the cottage, and tell them about our plans.
'Eh bien, Philippe,' I returned, more disappointed than I should have cared to acknowledge at his not asking me to accompany him the remainder of the distance to the stile, to which I always walked with him when Robert Wentworth was not with us. Moreover, I thought that the parting kiss was to be forgotten. I believe that it was forgotten for a moment. But he turned back and pressed his lips for a moment upon my brow.
'Good-night, Mary. God grant I may be worthy of you!'
'Good-night, Philip,' I faltered.
As in a dream I walked down the lane, entered the cottage, and turned into the little parlour, not a little relieved to find no one there.
The heat was almost stifling, the swallows flying low beneath the lowering sky, and there was the heavy stillness—the, so to speak, pause in the atmosphere which presages a coming storm. The windows and doors were flung wide open; and I could hear Mrs Tipper and Becky talking to each other in their confidential way, as they bustled in and out the back garden, fetching in the clothes, which the former always put out to 'sweeten,' as she termed it, after they were returned from the wash. Lilian was, I suppose, in her own room, as her habit was of late.
Throwing off my hat, I sat down, and with my hands tightly locked upon my lap, I tried to think—to understand my own sensations, asking myself over and over again what was wrong—what made me like this? half conscious all the while of a discussion over a hole in a tablecloth, that ought not to have been allowed to get to such a stage without being darned.