She walked with her hand resting lightly on his arm. He had offered it
to her on coming out of the Registry Office, and she had accepted it
silently. Her head drooped, she seemed to be turning matters over in her
mind. She said, alluding to the Fynes: "They have been very good to me."
At that he exclaimed:
"They have never understood you. Well, not properly. My sister is not a
bad woman, but . . . "
Flora didn't protest; asking herself whether he imagined that he himself
understood her so much better. Anthony dismissing his family out of his
thoughts went on: "Yes. Everything is yours. I have kept nothing back.
As to the piece of paper we have just got from that miserable
quill-driver if it wasn't for the law, I wouldn't mind if you tore it up
here, now, on this spot. But don't you do it. Unless you should some
day feel that--"
He choked, unexpectedly. She, reflective, hesitated a moment then making
up her mind bravely.
"Neither am I keeping anything back from you."
She had said it! But he in his blind generosity assumed that she was
alluding to her deplorable history and hastened to mutter:
"Of course! Of course! Say no more. I have been lying awake thinking
of it all no end of times."
He made a movement with his other arm as if restraining himself from
shaking an indignant fist at the universe; and she never even attempted
to look at him. His voice sounded strangely, incredibly lifeless in
comparison with these tempestuous accents that in the broad fields, in
the dark garden had seemed to shake the very earth under her weary and
hopeless feet.
She regretted them. Hearing the sigh which escaped her Anthony instead
of shaking his fist at the universe began to pat her hand resting on his
arm and then desisted, suddenly, as though he had burnt himself. Then
after a silence: "You will have to go by yourself to-morrow. I . . . No, I think I
mustn't come. Better not. What you two will have to say to each other--"
She interrupted him quickly: "Father is an innocent man. He was cruelly wronged."
"Yes. That's why," Anthony insisted earnestly. "And you are the only
human being that can make it up to him. You alone must reconcile him
with the world if anything can. But of course you shall. You'll have to
find words. Oh you'll know. And then the sight of you, alone, would
soothe--"
"He's the gentlest of men," she interrupted again.