She was thinking only of him; she wanted no one younger and handsomer; in her eyes and thoughts he was not old: he was her boy. Those words had a terrible effect upon him. They entered his blood as if they had been an injection of some sweetly narcotic drug; thy lanced deep into his bowels as if they had been a surgeon's knife; they made him like a half-anesthetized patient who at the same time dreams of paradise and feels that he is bleeding to death.
"You are my boy ... and I am your loving girl."
He moved from the gate, hurried along the dusty road, and entered Hadleigh Wood at the first footpath. As he got over the stile he was saying to himself, "This letter finishes me. I can't go on with it after this. I'm done for."
Then, as he walked in the cool silence beneath the dark firs, he held her letter to his lips--kissed the inked crosses that she had set as marks to represent her kisses--counted and kissed them and counted them until his hot tears blinded him.
She wanted him; she longed for him; he was her boy.
He could get to her to-night. She was only twenty or twenty-two miles away, as the crow flies--say half an hour's journey if one had the wings of a heron. He could rush home, jump into his gig, and send the horse at a gallop; he could get there by road or rail, somehow; he could telegraph, telling her not to go to bed, telling her to go to the station and wait for him there.
Then he would walk with her in the moonlight by the sea, on the wet sand, close to the breaking waves. When they came back to the Institution no light would be showing from any of the windows, and she might say, "I'm shut out. When they come down to let me in, won't they make a fuss?" But he would say, "You are not going in there again." "What," she would say, "are you taking me back to Vine-Pits after only two days? Don't you think Mrs. Dale will be angry?"
Then he would say, "I'm not taking you back. I'm going to take you half across the world with me. I've tried hard, Norah, but I can't do without you. I own up, I'm beat, I take the consequences. I'm not good, I'm bad. I've done wicked things, and now I'm ripe for the crowning wickedness. I'm going to break my wife's heart, dishonor my children's name, and take you down to hell with me."