Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/234

 moment he was alone with himself, and looking backwards, realisation of the eager facility with which he had successively severed each link, and the rapidity with which he had set himself drifting towards a future, impenetrable with mysterious uncertainty, stole over him. He had done it all, he told himself, deliberately, unaided; bewildered, he tried to bring himself face to face with his former self, to survey himself as he had been before the fever— that afternoon when he had gone up to Beda Cottages—plodding indifferently through life in the joyless, walled-in valley, which, he now understood, had in a measure reflected the spirit of his own listless broodings. Scared remorse seized him. The prospect of departure, now that it was close at hand, frightened him; left him aching as with the burden of dead weight, so that, for a while, he remained inert, dully acquiescing in his accumulating disquietude.

Then, in desperation, he invoked her figure, imagining a dozen incoherent versions of the coming scene—the tense words of greeting, his passionate pleading, her impulsive yielding, and the acknowledgment of her trust in him

By-and-bye, Mrs. Parkin brought him his dinner. He chatted to her with apparent unconcern, jested regarding his appetite; for a curious calm, the lucidity evoked by suppressed elation, pervaded him.

But through the night he tossed restlessly, waking in the darkness to find himself throbbing with triumphant exhilaration; each time striking matches to examine the face of his watch, and beginning afresh to calculate the hours that separated him from the moment that was to bind them together—the irrevocable starting towards the future years.

She stood in the bow-window of her drawing-room, arranging some cut flowers in slender pink and blue vases, striped with enamel