as if it never had been. Whenever he suggested that they should leave their shelter, and go forwards towards Southampton or London, she showed a strange unwillingness to move.
“Why should we put an end to all that’s sweet and lovely!” she deprecated. “What must come will come.” And, looking through the shutter-chink: “All is trouble outside there; inside here content.”
He peeped out also. It was quite true; within was affection, union, error forgiven: outside was the inexorable.
“And—and,” she said, pressing her cheek against his, “I fear that what you think of me now may not last. I do not wish to outlive your present feeling for me. I would rather not. I would rather be dead and buried when the time comes for you to despise me, so that it may never be known to me that you despised me.”
“I cannot ever despise you.”
“I also hope that. But considering what my life has been, I cannot see why any man should, sooner or later, be able to help despising me. … How wickedly mad I was! Yet formerly I never could bear to hurt a fly or a worm, and the sight of a bird in a cage used often to make me cry.”
They remained yet another day. In the night the dull sky cleared, and the result was that the old caretaker at the cottage awoke early. The brilliant sunrise made her unusually brisk; she decided to open the contiguous mansion immediately, and to air it thoroughly on such a day. Thus it occurred that, having arrived and opened the lower rooms before six o’clock, she ascended to the bedchambers, and was about to turn the handle of the one wherein they lay. At that moment she fancied she could hear the breathing of persons within. Her slippers and her antiquity had rendered her progress a noiseless one so far, and she made for instant retreat; then, deeming that her hearing might have deceived