plained, surely. I had not been two minutes beside Minny when you came up. My kiss on her arm was no more than her eating a blackberry. A few minutes before that, I had stopped by the paddock and kissed a two-year-old mare. One kiss was as important as the other. To me—to the mare—to Minny!"
He looked down into her pale, firmly modelled face, with its look of courage, of endurance, its what she called "Dutch" look of stability. Yet about her mouth was a look of fatigue, as though she were played out by the isolation and the ingrown emotions of the last months.
He continued: "I wish I could make you believe in my love as I believe in it myself. There's nothing on earth I could want so much as to have you for my own. Do you believe that?"
She did not answer.
A motor-car whizzed by them, raising the dust in a cloud. "Come," he said, "let us get off this road. It's so hot and dusty, it will give you a headache."
But she trudged doggedly on.
"Alayne," he persisted, "why don't you say something—if it's only to say that you don't believe me—that you're sick of the sight of me?"
She tried to answer, but her mouth was parched and her lips refused to move. She felt that she must go on for ever, walking along this road, with him following her, longing to cry out, yet unable to speak, as in a nightmare. She would go on till she stumbled and fell.
He did not speak again, but walked beside her, trying once rather pathetically to suit his stride to hers. At the foot of the steps that led to the church he stopped.
"Where are you going?" he asked.
"To your grandmother's grave. I haven't seen it yet. Do I hear Finch playing in the church?"
"No, no. Finch is in bed. He tried to drown himself this morning." Let her have that. Perhaps it would shock her out of this terrible quiet.
"Yes," she said calmly. "Eden told me. No wonder!"
"God, how you hate us!"
"No—I fear you."
