She was strangely shaken.
"I will try--and understand," she said in a voice that trembled.
"All my power of doing anything depends on it!" he said, passionately. "I
can say truly that things would have been infinitely worse if I had not
been here. And I have worked like a horse to better them--before you
came."
She was silent. His appeal to her as to his judge hurt her poignantly.
Yet what could she do or say? Her natural longing was to console; but
where were the elements of consolation? _Could_ anything be worse than
what she had seen and heard?
The mingled emotion which silenced her, warned her not to continue the
conversation. She perceived the opening of a side-lane leading back to
the river and the Keswick road.
"This is my best way, I think," she said, pausing, and holding out her
hand. "The pony-cart is waiting for me at Whitebeck."
He looked at her in distress, yet also in anger. A friend might surely
have stood by him more cordially, believed in him more simply.
"You are at home again? I may come and see you."
"Please! We shall want to hear."
Her tone was embarrassed. They parted almost coldly.
Lydia walked quickly home, down a sloping lane from which the ravines of
Blencathra, edge behind edge, chasm beyond chasm, were to be seen against
the sunset, and all the intermediate landscape--wood, and stubble, and
ferny slope--steeped in stormy majesties of light. But for once the quick
artist sense was shut against Nature's spectacles.
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