“And I?”
“Ah! you, dear one! Yes, I know all that you must suffer. Your heart is torn like my own. You love just as fondly as I do, and you have mourned just as bitterly. To you, the parting is as hard as to myself. My life had been one of darkness and despair ever since that night in London when I was forced to lie to you. I wrecked your happiness because circumstances conspired against us—because it was my duty as a daughter to save my father from ruin and penury. Have you really in your heart forgiven me, Godfrey?”
“Yes, my darling. How can I blame you for what was, after all, the noblest sacrifice a woman could make?”
“Then let me go,” she urged, speaking in a low, distinct voice, pale almost to the lips. “We must part—therefore perhaps the sooner the better, and the sooner my life is ended the more swiftly will peace and happiness come to me. For me the grave holds no terrors. Only because I leave you alone shall I regret,” she sobbed.
“And yet I must in future be alone,” I said, swallowing the lump that arose in my throat. “No, Ella!” I cried, “I cannot bear it. I cannot again live without your presence.”
“Alas! you must,” was her hoarse reply. “You must—you must.”
Wandering full of grief and bitter thoughts, vivid and yet confused, the hours sped by uncounted.
To the cosmopolitan, like I had grown to be, green plains have a certain likeness, whether in Belgium, Germany or Britain. A row of poplars quivering in the sunshine looks much alike in Normandy or in Northamptonshire. A deep forest all aglow with red and gold in autumn tints is the same thing, after all, in Tuscany, as in Yorkshire.
But England, our own dear old England, has also a physiognomy that is all her own; that is like nothing else in all the world; pastures intensely green, high hawthorn hedges and muddy lanes, which to some minds is sad and strange and desolate and painful, and which to others is beautiful, but which, be it what else it may, is always wholly and solely English, can never be met with elsewhere, and has a smile of peace and prosperity upon it, and a sigh in it that make other lands beside it seem as though they were soulless and were dumb.
We had unconsciously taken a path that, skirting a wood, ran up over a low hill southward. To our left lay the beautiful Cornish country in the sweet misty grey of the morning light. The sun was shining and the tremulous wood smoke curled up in the rosy air from a cottage chimney.