Parliament. It did not seem to involve a nearer approach to
her. She said, 'You have not wasted your time in England.' It was for my
solitary interests that she cared, then.

I brooded desperately. I could conceive an overlooking height that made
her utterance simple and consecutive: I could not reach it. Topics
which to me were palpitating, had no terror for her. She said, 'I have
offended my father; I have written to him; he will take me away.' In
speaking of the letter which had caused her to offend, she did not blame
the writer. I was suffered to run my eyes over it, and was ashamed.
It read to me too palpably as an outcry to delude and draw her
hither:--pathos and pathos: the father holding his dying son in his
arms, his sole son, Harry Richmond; the son set upon by enemies in the
night: the lover never daring to beg for a sight of his beloved ere he
passed away:--not an ill-worded letter; read uncritically, it may have
been touching: it must have been, though it was the reverse for me. I
frowned, broke down in regrets, under sharp humiliation.

She said, 'You knew nothing of it. A little transgression is the real
offender. When we are once out of the way traced for us, we are in
danger of offending at every step; we are as lawless as the outcasts.'
That meant, 'My turning aside to you originally was the blameable
thing.' It might mean, 'My love of you sets my ideas of duty at variance
with my father's.'

She smiled; nothing was uttered in a tone of despondency. Her high
courage and breeding gave her even in this pitfall the smoothness which
most women keep for society. Why she had not sent me any message or
tidings of herself to Riversley was not a matter that she could imagine
to perplex me: she could not imagine my losing faith in her. The least
we could do, I construed it, the religious bond between us was a faith
in one another that should sanctify to our souls the external injuries
it caused us to commit. But she talked in no such strain. Her delight in
treading English ground was her happy theme. She said, 'It is as young
as when we met in the forest'; namely, the feeling revived for England.
How far off we were from the green Devonshire coast, was one of her
questions, suggestive of our old yacht-voyage lying among her dreams.
Excepting an extreme and terrorizing paleness, there was little to fever
me with the thought that she suffered mortally. Of reproach, not a word;
nor of regret. At the first touch o