The Devil

Mavis, however, would wish to remember him, and be sorry when she found his image fading. She would struggle to keep it bright and fresh. She would grieve long and sincerely--and then she would be quite happy. She wouldn't marry again; she wouldn't do anything foolish. "No," he thought, "she'll just devote herself to the bairns, working for them late and early, and managing the business as well as I have managed it myself. She'll be cheated a bit here and there, as a woman always is--but, all said and done, she'll do very well without me. Customers will support her--the word will go round. 'Don't let's turn our backs on the widow of that poor fellow Dale.'"

And he thought, with a bitterness of heart that almost made him sick, that perhaps after his death many people might speak well of him; that certainly in the little world of Vine-Pits Farm and the Cross Road cottages there would be a natural inclination to exaggerate his few good qualities and be gentle to his innumerable faults; so that a sort of legend of virtue would weave itself about his memory, making him a humble, insignificant, but local saint--to be placed at a respectful distance and yet not too far from the shrine of that great and illustrious saint the late Mr. Barradine. "Of course," people might say, "one was a grand gentleman, and the other only a common fellow who had raised himself a bit by hard work; but both of 'em were good kind men, and both no doubt have met with the reward of their goodness up there in Heaven."

As soon as he got into the wood he hurried as rapidly as he could toward Kibworth Rocks; and then when he got near them he walked slowly up and down the ride, with his head bowed and his hands clasped behind his back. And each evening the same thing happened. Visions of Norah assailed him; he passed again through the tortures of yearning desire that he had felt when he first read her letter; and he said to himself, "If proof was wanted, here's the proof. This would show me, if I didn't know already, that I must do it."

In imagination he saw her sitting alone on a balk of timber by the sea. Her hands lay loose in her lap; her neck was bent; her whole attitude indicated dejection, loneliness, sadness. She was thinking about him. She was thinking, "How cruel of him not to answer my sad little letter. He can't be so busy but what he could have found time to send me a few lines with his own hand. Just half a sheet of paper would have been enough--with one or two ink crosses at the end, to show me he prized the kisses that I put in my letter to him. It was brutal, yes, and cowardly, to make Mrs. Dale write instead. If Mrs. Dale hadn't written telling me he'd received my letter, I couldn't have found it in my heart to believe that he'd treat me so abominably cruel."