Page:Comin' Thro' the Rye (1898).djvu/438

430 not time, man's inconstancy, and her own maddening loveliness, have closed the wounds that gaped so widely three years and more ago? Three years ago? Little enough to a woman, with her empty, uniform days: an eternity to a man who has a man's busy eventful life to lead. He must have forgotten me, or he could never have borne to come back to a place which must remind him, at every turn, of the old days. And yet the man I saw looking out, over the field of rye, two hours ago, looked like anything rather than a man with his heart at rest. If he would only go away soon, and leave me in peace—or that dull refuge of apathy that I misname peace! Mother comes in, and sits down beside me in the half light.

"You know he has come back, dear!" she says.

"I know it, mother."

"He might have stayed away," she says, with a quick anger in her tone; "he ought to have known better than to come."

She does not love him. Poor mother! to her he is the man through whom her daughter's life has been spoiled. She thinks him weak and sinning, as many another would think who did not know the man or his temptations.

"He has been away long enough, mother. He could not stay for ever. You forget the estate. No doubt he was forced to come."

"Well!" says mother, sighing, "the misery of it all we know, the unpleasantnesses of it have now to be faced."

Yes, they have to be, surely enough. What mortal can remain on the mountain-tops of misery always, and is not obliged to descend to the valleys of commonplace consideration now and then?

"I don't know what to do," says mother. "As to calling on, and receiving that woman, I will not." (It must be a very bad female indeed that goads mother into calling her "that woman.")