"Oh, poor Sue!"
"I don't think of you like that means! It did just OCCUR to me to
regard you in the way they think I do, but I hadn't begun to. I HAVE
recognized that the cousinship was merely nominal, since we met as
total strangers. But my marrying you, dear Jude--why, of course,
if I had reckoned upon marrying you I shouldn't have come to you so
often! And I never supposed you thought of such a thing as marrying
me till the other evening; when I began to fancy you did love me a
little. Perhaps I ought not to have been so intimate with you. It
is all my fault. Everything is my fault always!"
The speech seemed a little forced and unreal, and they regarded each
other with a mutual distress.
"I was so blind at first!" she went on. "I didn't see what you felt
at all. Oh, you have been unkind to me--you have--to look upon me
as a sweetheart without saying a word, and leaving me to discover it
myself! Your attitude to me has become known; and naturally they
think we've been doing wrong! I'll never trust you again!"
"Yes, Sue," he said simply; "I am to blame--more than you think. I
was quite aware that you did not suspect till within the last meeting
or two what I was feeling about you. I admit that our meeting as
strangers prevented a sense of relationship, and that it was a sort
of subterfuge to avail myself of it. But don't you think I deserve a
little consideration for concealing my wrong, very wrong, sentiments,
since I couldn't help having them?"
She turned her eyes doubtfully towards him, and then looked away as
if afraid she might forgive him.
By every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that
fitted the mood and the moment, under the suasion of which Sue's
undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have changed
its temperature. Some men would have cast scruples to the winds,
and ventured it, oblivious both of Sue's declaration of her neutral
feelings, and of the pair of autographs in the vestry chest of
Arabella's parish church. Jude did not. He had, in fact, come in
part to tell his own fatal story. It was upon his lips; yet at the
hour of this distress he could not disclose it. He preferred to
dwell upon the recognized barriers between them.
"Of course--I know you don't--care about me in any particular way,"
he sorrowed. "You ought not, and you are right. You belong to--Mr.
Phillotson. I suppose he has been to see you?"