CHAPTER XVIIN WHICH GEORGE PROVES TO BE BUT HUMANTHEletter which had presented such difficulties to George was finished at last, and while Rhys was sitting with Isoline upon the rock, he was trudging down to Crishowell with it in his pocket. At the village he captured a stray urchin to whom he confided it, promising him a penny, which was to be paid on the following day at twelve o’clock; the boy was to go to the blacksmith’s shop, where his patron would await the expected answer. He did not tell him to bring it to the cottage, as, since Rhys’ arrival, he had strongly discouraged all visitors.“Dere Mary,” he had written, “I write these few lines hopeing you wil not take it il ’tis trewly ment. Dere Mary, wil you have me? What is dun is dun and can’t be undun so take hart. I wil be a good husband and love you well never doute it.“Yours trewly,“GEORGEWILLIAMS.”When the letter reached its destination, Mary was looking out of the diamond-paned window of the toll-house, and as she opened the door to the boy’s knock, he thrust it into her hand, telling her he would come for the answer in the morning. She took it in, and went up with it to the little room where she slept, for there was no light in the kitchen. Lighting a tallow dip which stood in a tin candlestick, she sat down, spreadingthe paper out in front of her; a letter was such an unusual thing in her experience that she opened it with a sort of misgiving. She read it to the end hurriedly, as hurriedly as her inefficiency and the cramped handwriting would permit, but it was so exceedingly surprising that she could hardly take it in; it lay on the table in the circle of yellow light, a dumb, yet disturbing thing, knocking like an unbidden guest at the closed door of her heart. It brought the strong face of the man with the bill-hook before her, an intruder, almost a vision of fear.She felt that it was incumbent upon her to feel something, but what she could not tell, and she laughed as she folded the letter and pushed it underneath the candlestick. When she went down again to the kitchen where the new toll-keeper and his wife were sitting, they looked at her with solemn curiosity, such as was due to the recipient of a letter, but she made no allusion to it, and went up early to bed after supper, leaving the two by the fire.Before putting out the light, she read George’s proposal over again, and repeated it to herself as she lay in her attic with her eyes on the patch of starlit sky which filled the window high up in the roof. How often she had lain there, with her little child in her arms, and watched the handle of the Plough describing its quarter-circle on the heavens. She remembered that and buried her face in the pillow. She wondered whether there was any one in the world so entirely alone as herself, and though she thought with gratitude of the couple sleeping peacefully in the room off the kitchen below, she knew very well that she had no place in their lives. The world—that void peopled with strangers—confronted her, and she had no more spirit left with which to meet it, for her arms were empty of the burden that alone had given her courage.The excitement which comes upon nervous people at night in the presence of difficulties took hold of her; one bugbear after another pressed upon her brain, and though the attic was cold, she sat up as the hours went by, feverish with contendingthoughts, and saw the whiteness of the letter lying on a chair under the window.It would be a solution to many anxieties, though hardly the one she would have chosen; but beggars cannot be choosers, and she allowed herself to dwell upon the idea, with the result that as it grew more familiar, it also grew less formidable. She did not want to marry—why could he not give her his friendship only, with no thought of any other relationship? She needed that, and since it had been offered, the knowledge of it had been a greater support than she could have supposed. On first reading the letter she had lost the sense of this, but now it came back, and George’s calm personality was a soothing thing to think about. She shut her eyes, and brought back to her mind that terrible hour by the river, and all he had done for her. He had gone with her to the toll-house door that day, and left her taking with him a promise that she would never attempt her own life again.The restraint of the letter gave her confidence. She felt that, had he made a declaration of love as well as an offer of marriage, she could not have listened to it for a moment; she had had enough of love, were it false love or true. If he married her he would be marrying her out of pity, and she almost thought that she liked and trusted him enough to accept the fact. Had he asked for love she could not have pretended to give it him. But he had asked for nothing. It was like a business proposal, so dispassionate was it. He had said, “I wil love you well never doute it,” but that gave promise of the loyal affection of a tried companion, not the passion of a lover for the woman loved, and it demanded nothing in return, not even gratitude, though she felt that she could and would give him plenty of that. She would have a home, and she did not doubt that it would be a better one than many a woman got whose domestic relations were considered fortunate. The quiet of the thought calmed her, and she fell asleep while she turned over the restful possibility in her mind.In the morning she rose early and went down to the kitchento light the fire, for she had lately made a practice of this, being glad to do anything to help the toll-keeper’s wife. As she laid the wood she thought of the letter waiting to be answered. Morning had almost brought the decision to say “No.” Everything seemed less formidable in the daylight, and sleep had steadied her nerves and cleared away the spectres of the darkness; it was not until she had sat down in the attic, pen in hand, to renounce the haven held open for her that she wavered. While she hesitated the boy knocked at the door below, and standing at the turning-point of her way, Mary’s heart failed her.She wanted time. In a few minutes she had got no nearer to her decision, and the messenger waiting in the road began to kick the doorstep impatiently. She tore the sheet of paper in half, and wrote on the blank part of it.“Dear George Williams, i dont know what to do i cant say yes nor no. i know you are a good man and many thanks. forgive me i mean to do rite i will send the anser to Crishowell on market day your obliged friend“MARYVAUGHAN.”She had received a little education, and had taught herself a good deal during her intimacy with Rhys, spending many evenings in attempts to improve in reading and writing. What puzzled her most in the present case was how to address her suitor, and, more than all, how to subscribe herself. She wondered, as she watched the boy’s back retreating towards Crishowell, whether she had done so rightly. He was her friend, she told herself, and she was obliged indeed.On market day George prepared to go down to the toll and hear his fate. His objection to letting his messenger come to the cottage was his reason for this, and not any excitement brought on by the occasion. He was no hot-headed lad rushing off to his sweetheart; he was a man with whom life had gone wrong, so wrong as to have given him a verypresent determination to prevent another life from sliding down the hill into that slough which had all but swallowed up his own. He was struggling in it yet, and he could not hope to set his feet on firm ground for some time to come. But when that day should arrive, and he could begin to toil up the slope again, he meant to tow up an extra burden with him. He felt himself strong and hard and patient, and he liked to think that his strength and hardness and patience might do for two.In spite of the absence of romance in his wooing, he determined that no outward sign of it should be missing from his errand—he felt it to be due to Mary. The butterfly, whose wings had been scorched by the fires of life, should be pursued with nets and lures as though it were the most gaudy and unattainable of winged creatures. For this reason his best suit of working-clothes (he possessed no Sunday ones) had been carefully brushed over-night, and his boots cleaned. He ducked his head into the water-bucket and scrubbed it with his coarse towel, flattening and smoothing his hair before the scrap of looking-glass till it shone. He shaved himself with great care, and trimmed the two inches of whisker, which made lines in front of his ears, until they became mere shadings, and then took from some hidden lair, in which he kept such things, a purple neckcloth with white bird’s-eye spots on it. This he tied with infinite care. As he was dusting his hat he looked up, to see Rhys standing in the doorway of the partition; he had been so much occupied with his dressing that he had not heard him come up the ladder. He turned very red. Walters was smiling contemptuously. “You’re very fine this morning,” he said, with his eye resting on a patch just below George’s knee, “I suppose you’re going courting.”Williams took up the rabbit-headed stick, and for answer unlocked and opened the door which had its key always turned as a protective measure when there was the chance of Rhys coming up-stairs.Before shutting it he dropped the key into his pocket.“I’m taking this along with me,” he remarked, “so you may just get down below again.” It was the first piece of active malice into which the other had provoked him.As he went towards the village he picked a bit of holly from a bush and stuck it into his buttonhole. It added a good deal to his festal air, and the bright sun exhilarated him after the cold water he had applied to himself so copiously. The stolid gloom which seemed to surround him on ordinary days had lifted, and any one meeting him that morning and looking at him without pleasure would have been a dullard. He had health, strength greater than that of most men, and he was only twenty-eight years old. And he had a face that no living thing could doubt.He hit out cheerfully at the dry little oak-apples in the hedge, for Rhys’ sneer had run off him like water off the traditional duck’s back, and been swallowed in the thought of its perpetrator tied to the underground room till his return. When generous people are goaded into malice they get their money’s worth out of the experience, and Williams’ little excursion into the devil’s dominions had done him a world of good. His prospects were no better than they had been on the preceding night, and he was about to try and hang an additional weight round his neck, but human nature and a spotted neckcloth will do wonders for a man sometimes, and the sense of well-being pervaded everything. Nevertheless, as he turned into the Brecon road, and met the toll-people on their way to Llangarth market, his spirits waned a little from pure fear of the matter in hand, and he stood before the door waiting admittance, sincerely hoping that Mary might not see how his hands shook.Mary had determined on the answer she would give. Through all her wrongs and troubles she had set up a certain standard of right for herself, and she did not mean to sink below it; whatever her shortcoming in other ways had been, she had injured none but herself, and on none but herself should the reckoning fall. What preserved the strong tower of self-respect in her was that fact, and were she to lose sight of it,the whole edifice would crumble to the earth. In the terrors of the night, indeed, she had wavered and almost resolved to take the home offered without more ado, but with the new strength that comes to young lives with sunrise, she had put the idea away from her. No one else should pay, no one else should suffer, least of all George Williams who was her friend. She was thinking of him when she heard his knock, and opened the door to find him standing on the other side of it.He walked into the house without waiting to be invited, and shut the door behind him. The blood tingled in his face, which was ruddy with the morning air, and the holly in his coat made a bright spot of colour in the room; his large frame seemed larger by contrast with the furniture.“Will you please to sit down?” said she, mechanically pushing forward the wooden chair in which her father had been used to sit.“Thank ye, no, I’d best stand,” answered George.So they faced each other, the man with his back to the window. Mary had only seen him twice before, but a very definite idea of him had remained in her mind, and as he stood there she felt as though she were looking at a totally different person. He was younger, smarter, and it made her hot to think that she had leaned against his shoulder and wept her heart out in the circle of his arm. Then, he had been simply a protector, but now he had turned into a powerful-looking young man in a purple neckcloth. He had called himself her friend, but he was a stranger and she had no right in his life—certainly no right to spoil it with her ruined one. Her heart beat quick as she held the back of the chair.“I’ve come to get the answer,” said Williams simply.“I can’t! I can’t do it,” replied the girl.There was silence in the little room, and the two cheap clocks which stood on the dresser ticked loudly, one half a second behind the other. He drew an imaginary line on the floor with the ash-plant in his hand.“Well, I’m sorry,” he said, looking down at the point of the stick. She did not speak.“I suppose you couldn’t come to like me in time? Likely enough I bean’t the sort for a girl to fancy, but ye shan’t rue it if ye take me. Don’t be afeard.”She looked up and saw behind the calm, heavy face into the upright soul of the sheep-stealer, and the sight made her more determined. “It’s not that. But don’t you ask me, George Williams—don’t you, for I can’t.”“D’ye think I shouldn’t like ye enough?” he asked, after a pause. “Is it that that’s the trouble?”“Ye may like me a bit,” she answered boldly, “but it’s goodness wi’ you, not love.”“I like you well,” he said, “don’t disbelieve me. Mary, Mary, you’re not taking on about that—about Walters o’ Masterhouse, curse him?”“I can’t but think of him. I hate him, but I think of him.”“You hate him, Mary?”“I saw my father lyin’ dead i’ this room. Lyin’ there on the bed. They fetched it in. Oh, my God! my God!” She turned away from him. “Go! Go!” she cried, facing round again, “and I’ll think of your goodness, that I will; but I can’t take ye, George, so let me be.”“Mary,” he persisted, “will you let me come back? Maybe, as time gets on, you’d forget a bit.”He had come to her meaning to act the part of a lover conscientiously, but he was finding little need for acting; no woman he had ever seen appealed to him as this one did. He stood in the middle of the room unwilling to go. She came up to him, and laying her fingers upon his arm, urged him towards the door. When they reached the lintel, he took hold of her hand. “Let me come again,” he begged, “let me come back. Do, Mary, do.”“No, no,” she exclaimed, drawing it away, “’tis no manner o’ use. Good-bye; go now, good-bye.”George Williams was but human, and his heart was boundingwithin him. “All right,” he said, thickly, “I’ll be off then. But oh, Mary, give me one kiss before I go!” and, in his earnestness, he made as though he would draw her towards him.She sprang back, blushing scarlet to the roots of her hair. “Ah!” she cried, “an’ I thought you were different!”Before he had realized what had happened she had shut the door, and he heard the bolt shoot into its place. He stood in the road, mortified, ashamed, furious with himself. But as he turned to make his way home between the leafless hedges, he knew that he loved her.
THEletter which had presented such difficulties to George was finished at last, and while Rhys was sitting with Isoline upon the rock, he was trudging down to Crishowell with it in his pocket. At the village he captured a stray urchin to whom he confided it, promising him a penny, which was to be paid on the following day at twelve o’clock; the boy was to go to the blacksmith’s shop, where his patron would await the expected answer. He did not tell him to bring it to the cottage, as, since Rhys’ arrival, he had strongly discouraged all visitors.
“Dere Mary,” he had written, “I write these few lines hopeing you wil not take it il ’tis trewly ment. Dere Mary, wil you have me? What is dun is dun and can’t be undun so take hart. I wil be a good husband and love you well never doute it.“Yours trewly,“GEORGEWILLIAMS.”
“Dere Mary,” he had written, “I write these few lines hopeing you wil not take it il ’tis trewly ment. Dere Mary, wil you have me? What is dun is dun and can’t be undun so take hart. I wil be a good husband and love you well never doute it.
“Yours trewly,
“GEORGEWILLIAMS.”
When the letter reached its destination, Mary was looking out of the diamond-paned window of the toll-house, and as she opened the door to the boy’s knock, he thrust it into her hand, telling her he would come for the answer in the morning. She took it in, and went up with it to the little room where she slept, for there was no light in the kitchen. Lighting a tallow dip which stood in a tin candlestick, she sat down, spreadingthe paper out in front of her; a letter was such an unusual thing in her experience that she opened it with a sort of misgiving. She read it to the end hurriedly, as hurriedly as her inefficiency and the cramped handwriting would permit, but it was so exceedingly surprising that she could hardly take it in; it lay on the table in the circle of yellow light, a dumb, yet disturbing thing, knocking like an unbidden guest at the closed door of her heart. It brought the strong face of the man with the bill-hook before her, an intruder, almost a vision of fear.
She felt that it was incumbent upon her to feel something, but what she could not tell, and she laughed as she folded the letter and pushed it underneath the candlestick. When she went down again to the kitchen where the new toll-keeper and his wife were sitting, they looked at her with solemn curiosity, such as was due to the recipient of a letter, but she made no allusion to it, and went up early to bed after supper, leaving the two by the fire.
Before putting out the light, she read George’s proposal over again, and repeated it to herself as she lay in her attic with her eyes on the patch of starlit sky which filled the window high up in the roof. How often she had lain there, with her little child in her arms, and watched the handle of the Plough describing its quarter-circle on the heavens. She remembered that and buried her face in the pillow. She wondered whether there was any one in the world so entirely alone as herself, and though she thought with gratitude of the couple sleeping peacefully in the room off the kitchen below, she knew very well that she had no place in their lives. The world—that void peopled with strangers—confronted her, and she had no more spirit left with which to meet it, for her arms were empty of the burden that alone had given her courage.
The excitement which comes upon nervous people at night in the presence of difficulties took hold of her; one bugbear after another pressed upon her brain, and though the attic was cold, she sat up as the hours went by, feverish with contendingthoughts, and saw the whiteness of the letter lying on a chair under the window.
It would be a solution to many anxieties, though hardly the one she would have chosen; but beggars cannot be choosers, and she allowed herself to dwell upon the idea, with the result that as it grew more familiar, it also grew less formidable. She did not want to marry—why could he not give her his friendship only, with no thought of any other relationship? She needed that, and since it had been offered, the knowledge of it had been a greater support than she could have supposed. On first reading the letter she had lost the sense of this, but now it came back, and George’s calm personality was a soothing thing to think about. She shut her eyes, and brought back to her mind that terrible hour by the river, and all he had done for her. He had gone with her to the toll-house door that day, and left her taking with him a promise that she would never attempt her own life again.
The restraint of the letter gave her confidence. She felt that, had he made a declaration of love as well as an offer of marriage, she could not have listened to it for a moment; she had had enough of love, were it false love or true. If he married her he would be marrying her out of pity, and she almost thought that she liked and trusted him enough to accept the fact. Had he asked for love she could not have pretended to give it him. But he had asked for nothing. It was like a business proposal, so dispassionate was it. He had said, “I wil love you well never doute it,” but that gave promise of the loyal affection of a tried companion, not the passion of a lover for the woman loved, and it demanded nothing in return, not even gratitude, though she felt that she could and would give him plenty of that. She would have a home, and she did not doubt that it would be a better one than many a woman got whose domestic relations were considered fortunate. The quiet of the thought calmed her, and she fell asleep while she turned over the restful possibility in her mind.
In the morning she rose early and went down to the kitchento light the fire, for she had lately made a practice of this, being glad to do anything to help the toll-keeper’s wife. As she laid the wood she thought of the letter waiting to be answered. Morning had almost brought the decision to say “No.” Everything seemed less formidable in the daylight, and sleep had steadied her nerves and cleared away the spectres of the darkness; it was not until she had sat down in the attic, pen in hand, to renounce the haven held open for her that she wavered. While she hesitated the boy knocked at the door below, and standing at the turning-point of her way, Mary’s heart failed her.
She wanted time. In a few minutes she had got no nearer to her decision, and the messenger waiting in the road began to kick the doorstep impatiently. She tore the sheet of paper in half, and wrote on the blank part of it.
“Dear George Williams, i dont know what to do i cant say yes nor no. i know you are a good man and many thanks. forgive me i mean to do rite i will send the anser to Crishowell on market day your obliged friend“MARYVAUGHAN.”
“Dear George Williams, i dont know what to do i cant say yes nor no. i know you are a good man and many thanks. forgive me i mean to do rite i will send the anser to Crishowell on market day your obliged friend
“MARYVAUGHAN.”
She had received a little education, and had taught herself a good deal during her intimacy with Rhys, spending many evenings in attempts to improve in reading and writing. What puzzled her most in the present case was how to address her suitor, and, more than all, how to subscribe herself. She wondered, as she watched the boy’s back retreating towards Crishowell, whether she had done so rightly. He was her friend, she told herself, and she was obliged indeed.
On market day George prepared to go down to the toll and hear his fate. His objection to letting his messenger come to the cottage was his reason for this, and not any excitement brought on by the occasion. He was no hot-headed lad rushing off to his sweetheart; he was a man with whom life had gone wrong, so wrong as to have given him a verypresent determination to prevent another life from sliding down the hill into that slough which had all but swallowed up his own. He was struggling in it yet, and he could not hope to set his feet on firm ground for some time to come. But when that day should arrive, and he could begin to toil up the slope again, he meant to tow up an extra burden with him. He felt himself strong and hard and patient, and he liked to think that his strength and hardness and patience might do for two.
In spite of the absence of romance in his wooing, he determined that no outward sign of it should be missing from his errand—he felt it to be due to Mary. The butterfly, whose wings had been scorched by the fires of life, should be pursued with nets and lures as though it were the most gaudy and unattainable of winged creatures. For this reason his best suit of working-clothes (he possessed no Sunday ones) had been carefully brushed over-night, and his boots cleaned. He ducked his head into the water-bucket and scrubbed it with his coarse towel, flattening and smoothing his hair before the scrap of looking-glass till it shone. He shaved himself with great care, and trimmed the two inches of whisker, which made lines in front of his ears, until they became mere shadings, and then took from some hidden lair, in which he kept such things, a purple neckcloth with white bird’s-eye spots on it. This he tied with infinite care. As he was dusting his hat he looked up, to see Rhys standing in the doorway of the partition; he had been so much occupied with his dressing that he had not heard him come up the ladder. He turned very red. Walters was smiling contemptuously. “You’re very fine this morning,” he said, with his eye resting on a patch just below George’s knee, “I suppose you’re going courting.”
Williams took up the rabbit-headed stick, and for answer unlocked and opened the door which had its key always turned as a protective measure when there was the chance of Rhys coming up-stairs.
Before shutting it he dropped the key into his pocket.
“I’m taking this along with me,” he remarked, “so you may just get down below again.” It was the first piece of active malice into which the other had provoked him.
As he went towards the village he picked a bit of holly from a bush and stuck it into his buttonhole. It added a good deal to his festal air, and the bright sun exhilarated him after the cold water he had applied to himself so copiously. The stolid gloom which seemed to surround him on ordinary days had lifted, and any one meeting him that morning and looking at him without pleasure would have been a dullard. He had health, strength greater than that of most men, and he was only twenty-eight years old. And he had a face that no living thing could doubt.
He hit out cheerfully at the dry little oak-apples in the hedge, for Rhys’ sneer had run off him like water off the traditional duck’s back, and been swallowed in the thought of its perpetrator tied to the underground room till his return. When generous people are goaded into malice they get their money’s worth out of the experience, and Williams’ little excursion into the devil’s dominions had done him a world of good. His prospects were no better than they had been on the preceding night, and he was about to try and hang an additional weight round his neck, but human nature and a spotted neckcloth will do wonders for a man sometimes, and the sense of well-being pervaded everything. Nevertheless, as he turned into the Brecon road, and met the toll-people on their way to Llangarth market, his spirits waned a little from pure fear of the matter in hand, and he stood before the door waiting admittance, sincerely hoping that Mary might not see how his hands shook.
Mary had determined on the answer she would give. Through all her wrongs and troubles she had set up a certain standard of right for herself, and she did not mean to sink below it; whatever her shortcoming in other ways had been, she had injured none but herself, and on none but herself should the reckoning fall. What preserved the strong tower of self-respect in her was that fact, and were she to lose sight of it,the whole edifice would crumble to the earth. In the terrors of the night, indeed, she had wavered and almost resolved to take the home offered without more ado, but with the new strength that comes to young lives with sunrise, she had put the idea away from her. No one else should pay, no one else should suffer, least of all George Williams who was her friend. She was thinking of him when she heard his knock, and opened the door to find him standing on the other side of it.
He walked into the house without waiting to be invited, and shut the door behind him. The blood tingled in his face, which was ruddy with the morning air, and the holly in his coat made a bright spot of colour in the room; his large frame seemed larger by contrast with the furniture.
“Will you please to sit down?” said she, mechanically pushing forward the wooden chair in which her father had been used to sit.
“Thank ye, no, I’d best stand,” answered George.
So they faced each other, the man with his back to the window. Mary had only seen him twice before, but a very definite idea of him had remained in her mind, and as he stood there she felt as though she were looking at a totally different person. He was younger, smarter, and it made her hot to think that she had leaned against his shoulder and wept her heart out in the circle of his arm. Then, he had been simply a protector, but now he had turned into a powerful-looking young man in a purple neckcloth. He had called himself her friend, but he was a stranger and she had no right in his life—certainly no right to spoil it with her ruined one. Her heart beat quick as she held the back of the chair.
“I’ve come to get the answer,” said Williams simply.
“I can’t! I can’t do it,” replied the girl.
There was silence in the little room, and the two cheap clocks which stood on the dresser ticked loudly, one half a second behind the other. He drew an imaginary line on the floor with the ash-plant in his hand.
“Well, I’m sorry,” he said, looking down at the point of the stick. She did not speak.
“I suppose you couldn’t come to like me in time? Likely enough I bean’t the sort for a girl to fancy, but ye shan’t rue it if ye take me. Don’t be afeard.”
She looked up and saw behind the calm, heavy face into the upright soul of the sheep-stealer, and the sight made her more determined. “It’s not that. But don’t you ask me, George Williams—don’t you, for I can’t.”
“D’ye think I shouldn’t like ye enough?” he asked, after a pause. “Is it that that’s the trouble?”
“Ye may like me a bit,” she answered boldly, “but it’s goodness wi’ you, not love.”
“I like you well,” he said, “don’t disbelieve me. Mary, Mary, you’re not taking on about that—about Walters o’ Masterhouse, curse him?”
“I can’t but think of him. I hate him, but I think of him.”
“You hate him, Mary?”
“I saw my father lyin’ dead i’ this room. Lyin’ there on the bed. They fetched it in. Oh, my God! my God!” She turned away from him. “Go! Go!” she cried, facing round again, “and I’ll think of your goodness, that I will; but I can’t take ye, George, so let me be.”
“Mary,” he persisted, “will you let me come back? Maybe, as time gets on, you’d forget a bit.”
He had come to her meaning to act the part of a lover conscientiously, but he was finding little need for acting; no woman he had ever seen appealed to him as this one did. He stood in the middle of the room unwilling to go. She came up to him, and laying her fingers upon his arm, urged him towards the door. When they reached the lintel, he took hold of her hand. “Let me come again,” he begged, “let me come back. Do, Mary, do.”
“No, no,” she exclaimed, drawing it away, “’tis no manner o’ use. Good-bye; go now, good-bye.”
George Williams was but human, and his heart was boundingwithin him. “All right,” he said, thickly, “I’ll be off then. But oh, Mary, give me one kiss before I go!” and, in his earnestness, he made as though he would draw her towards him.
She sprang back, blushing scarlet to the roots of her hair. “Ah!” she cried, “an’ I thought you were different!”
Before he had realized what had happened she had shut the door, and he heard the bolt shoot into its place. He stood in the road, mortified, ashamed, furious with himself. But as he turned to make his way home between the leafless hedges, he knew that he loved her.