Page:The White Peacock, Lawrence, 1911.djvu/334

326 after them, and she laughed. He pulled his watch out of his breeches’ pocket; it was half-past three.

“What are you looking at the time for?” she asked.

“Meg’s coming to tea,” he replied.

She said no more, and they walked slowly on.

When they came on to the shoulder of the hill, and looked down on to the mill, and the mill-pond, she said:

“I will not come down with you—I will go home.”

“Not come down to tea!” he exclaimed, full of reproach and amazement. “Why, what will they say?”

“No, I won’t come down—let me say farewell—’jamque Vale! Do you remember how Eurydice sank back into Hell?”

“But”—he stammered, “you must come down to tea—how can I tell them? Why won’t you come?”

She answered him in Latin, with two lines from Virgil. As she watched him, she pitied his helplessness, and gave him a last cut as she said, very softly and tenderly:

“It wouldn’t be fair to Meg.”

He stood looking at her; his face was coloured only by the grey-brown tan; his eyes, the dark, self-mistrustful eyes of the family, were darker than ever, dilated with misery of helplessness; and she was infinitely pitiful. She wanted to cry in her yearning.

“Shall we go into the wood for a few minutes?” she said, in a low, tremulous voice, as they turned aside.