"You see I'm right?"
"Oh yes, absolutely. It was only my perversity." A self-excusing, deprecatory shoulder-shrug. Peccavit confitetur is its import. Then he breaks into a good-humoured laugh. "After all, you know, there's always a way out of the difficulty."
Something brings a sudden exclamation from Adeline Fossett. "Yes, what?—but go on!" She has risen from her seat, and stands with her hands pressed close together, and eyes of expectation fixed on his. "Oh, Yorick!—is it—is it.... Oh, I do hope ... is it the one I've thought of?" She hesitates. He hesitates.
"That depends on what you have thought," he says at last. But with a suspicion that they may have thought alike, too.
"Oh, if I dared guess!... I don't know; dare I?...—yes, I will—I don't care!..."
"Go on!"
"If the Bill passes, you know ... then ... then ... you and Bessy to get married! Was that your idea, Yorick? Oh, do tell me!"
"Why, of course it was."
Miss Fossett throws herself back in her chair again, with a deep sigh as of relief. "Oh dear, how nice that would be!" she says. But she is taking it all to heart, and her eyes are full of tears. The Rector is very cool over it.
"It would be a way out of the difficulty," he says. "Not a bad one, perhaps. Better, at any rate, than Bess having to turn out and leave the children. They are quite like her own, you see. And it wouldn't make any difference." This is not quite understood, apparently, and he adds: "Everything would go on exactly as usual."