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Words: 82548 in 37 pages
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be only fitting that it should result from the efforts of the man in whom she had once had faith and confidence, though neither now was so strong as it had been.
A drowsy quietness brooded over Barrock-holme. The men were away shooting, and the women had driven to inspect some relics of the Roman occupation among the fells. She herself had made excuses for remaining behind.
There was not a movement among the birch leaves still hanging here and there, flecks of pale gold among the lace-like twigs beneath her, and the murmur of the gently swirling water emphasised the silence of the hollow. She could hear a squirrel shaking the beech-mast down, and the patter of the falling nuts rose sharply distinct from the thin carpet of yellow leaves. Then she felt her heart beat as the sound of footsteps reached her ears. The man she had once believed in was coming, and, if there was any way out of the difficulties that threatened her, it was his part to find it.
He came up the rude steps hastily, a well-favoured young man of her own world, and almost her own age, which she felt was in some ways unfortunate then. As he seized both her hands, with a little resolute movement she drew them away from him.
"No," she said a trifle sharply. "As I told you last time, that is all done with now. It was a little weak of me to see you, and you must not come here again."
The colour faded in the young man's face, and he clenched his hands spasmodically.
"Oh!" he said, with a catch in his breath, "you can't mean it, Carrie. In spite of what you told me, I had been trying to believe the thing was out of the question."
There was pain in Carrie Denham's face, and a little bitter smile flickered into her eyes.
"The thing one shrinks from most is generally the one that happens--unless one does something to make it impossible," she said.
The man reddened, for, though he was pleasant to look at, a stalwart, open-faced Englishman, he was very young, and it was, perhaps, not his fault that there was a lack of stiffness in his composition. He was not one to grapple resolutely with an emergency, and Carrie Denham, who had once looked up to him, realised it then.
"What could I do--what could anybody in my place do?" he said, with a little gesture that suggested desperation. "Stanley Crossthwaite is only sixty, and may live another twenty years. While he does, I'm something between his head keeper and a pensioner."
"Isn't it a pity you didn't think of that earlier?"
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