He spoke like an ascetic, dealing himself out many penances, and but one indulgence. His tone throughout was businesslike and decided, he was no longer the quiet indifferent dreamer of dreams, but the efficient man of the world, the man of action; and the fanciful hysterical woman at his side was completely dominated by his decision, and stilled for the moment into something like acquiescence with her fate.
She carried out all his directions faithfully and accurately, and in less than half an hour, joined him in the road outside the inn, veiled and spectacled, and demure as a nun about to take the vow!
“I have told them,” he said, “to bring the trap round to the Park Gates to meet you. So you will not need to go back to the inn at all. We have just half an hour.”
“But you are wasting your whole morning’s work,” she said as they turned in at the Park Gates. It was the first thing that occurred to her to say.
“Oh, just for once!” he replied. “My work will have no cause to complain of me—after to-day.”
She shuddered at the grimness of his accent—she apprehended his meaning only too well. She seemed to see him in her mind’s eye, as he would be henceforth, stooping, brooding, gloating over his work in the dell of Brignal, alone, as he was before she came there, and mildly, dully happy perhaps, as he may have been, before the Human Interest came to trouble him.
And yet—“He does not want to let me see how he feels it,” was the secret consolation that lay all the while at the back of her thought, explaining his brusqueness, his taciturnity, his hardness, which her surface mind could not help resenting and deprecating. Her soul’s life, which was then at its lowest ebb, lived on that thought, and her body took courage from it.
She walked into the Park almost briskly by his side, and when they had travelled a certain distance along the broad path, he made a significant movement of his hand towards her spectacles.
“Can you take those things off?” he asked her, imperiously.
She obediently doffed the symbol of her martyrdom and return to the paths of virtue, and handed them to him. He folded the spectacles and put them in his coat pocket.