“If you say it was June it must have been so. You should know.”
Her wayward strangeness puzzled him. At times he was even tempted to believe that what my Lord Gore had hinted at might some day prove too true. The thought roused in him a shock of rebellion at the heart, and an instinct of strong tenderness that woke a longing to cherish and to protect.
“Are you cold here? There is a mist beginning to rise from the river.”
“They will be wondering what has become of us.”
“Let them wonder. I will fetch you a cloak.”
“No. Let us go in.”
She shivered momentarily and rose from the bench, drawing a little away from him as they walked up the yew alley together. The east was full of a faint crimson splendor; the colder tints had not come as yet.
Neither of them appeared to have a word to say. Yet the silence was tinged with a vague mystery that seemed to catch the spirit of the dying day. To John Gore it seemed that any memory of that fatal year chilled the girl like the breath of a raw November night.
Barbara went to her room with a feeling of infinite loneliness weighing upon her heart, the loneliness of a gray twilight over a gray land. An utter dreariness dulled all feeling in her for the hour. Perfunctorily, almost blindly, she changed her dress, putting on something richer for the wax lights and the music in the state salon. A procession of dim thoughts moved slowly through her brain, their significance hurting her despite her obstinate self-will.
It was inevitable that the man should swear that he had sailed from England before the month of her father’s death.