"If he would not be--too proud to--take me, Barnabas."
"Oh, my lady--can't you see that if I--if I take you with me tonight,
you must be with me--always?"
Cleone sighed.
"And I am a discredited impostor, the--the jest of every club in
London!"
Cleone's hand stole up, and she touched his grimly-set chin very
gently with one white finger.
"I am become a thing for the Fashionable World to sharpen its wits
upon," he continued, keeping his stern gaze perseveringly averted.
"And so, my lady--because I cannot any longer cheat folks into
accepting me as a--gentleman, I shall in all probability become a
farmer, some day."
Cleone sighed.
"But you," Barnabas continued, a little harshly, "you were born for
higher and greater fortune than to become the wife of a humble
farming fellow, and consequently--"
"But I can make excellent butter, Barnabas," she sighed, stealing a
glance up to him, "and I can cook--a little."
Now when she said this, he must needs look down at her again and lo!
there, at the corner of her mouth was the ghost of the dimple! And,
beholding this, seeing the sudden witchery of her swift-drooping
lashes, Barnabas forgot his stern resolutions and stooped his head,
that he might kiss the glory of her hair. But, in that moment, she
turned, swift and sudden, and yielded him her lips, soft, and warm,
and passionate with youth and all the joy of life. And borne away
upon that kiss, it seemed to Barnabas, for one brief, mad-sweet
instant that all things might be possible; if they started now they
might reach London in the dawn and, staying only for Barrymaine, be
aboard ship by evening! And it was a wide world, a very fair world,
and with this woman beside him-"It would be so--so very easy!" said he, slowly.
"Yes, it will be very easy!" she whispered.
"Too easy!" said he, beginning to frown, "you are so helpless and
lonely, and I want you so bitterly, Cleone! Yes, it would be very
easy. But you taught me once, that a man must ever choose the harder
way, and this is the harder way, to love you, to long for you, and
to bid you--good-by!"
"Oh! Barnabas?"
"Ah, Cleone, you could make the wretchedest hut a paradise for me,
but for you, ah, for you it might some day become only a hut, and I,
only a discredited Amateur Gentleman, after all."
Then Barnabas sighed and thereafter frowned, and so bore her to the
chaise and setting her within, closed the door.
"Turn!" he cried to the postilion.
"Barnabas!"
But the word was lost in the creak of wheels and stamping of hoofs
as the chaise swung round; then Barnabas remounted and, frowning
still, trotted along beside it. Now in a while, lifting his sombre
gaze towards a certain place beside the way, he beheld the dim
outline of a finger-post, a very ancient finger-post which (though
it was too dark to read its inscription) stood, he knew, with
wide-stretched arms pointing the traveller: TO LONDON. TO HAWKHURST.