Nearly an hour passed, and then he returned an answer:
I do not wish to pain you. How well you KNOW I don't! Give me
a little time. I am disposed to agree to your last request.
One line from her:
Thank you from my heart, Richard. I do not deserve your
kindness.
All day Phillotson bent a dazed regard upon her through the glazed
partition; and he felt as lonely as when he had not known her.
But he was as good as his word, and consented to her living apart
in the house. At first, when they met at meals, she had seemed
more composed under the new arrangement; but the irksomeness of
their position worked on her temperament, and the fibres of her
nature seemed strained like harp-strings. She talked vaguely and
indiscriminately to prevent his talking pertinently.
IV
Phillotson was sitting up late, as was often his custom, trying to
get together the materials for his long-neglected hobby of Roman
antiquities. For the first time since reviving the subject he felt a
return of his old interest in it. He forgot time and place, and when
he remembered himself and ascended to rest it was nearly two o'clock.
His preoccupation was such that, though he now slept on the other
side of the house, he mechanically went to the room that he and his
wife had occupied when he first became a tenant of Old-Grove Place,
which since his differences with Sue had been hers exclusively.
He entered, and unconsciously began to undress.
There was a cry from the bed, and a quick movement. Before the
schoolmaster had realized where he was he perceived Sue starting up
half-awake, staring wildly, and springing out upon the floor on the
side away from him, which was towards the window. This was somewhat
hidden by the canopy of the bedstead, and in a moment he heard her
flinging up the sash. Before he had thought that she meant to do
more than get air she had mounted upon the sill and leapt out. She
disappeared in the darkness, and he heard her fall below.
Phillotson, horrified, ran downstairs, striking himself sharply
against the newel in his haste. Opening the heavy door he ascended
the two or three steps to the level of the ground, and there on the
gravel before him lay a white heap. Phillotson seized it in his
arms, and bringing Sue into the hall seated her on a chair, where he
gazed at her by the flapping light of the candle which he had set
down in the draught on the bottom stair.