"And now there is none. I don't profess to be afraid of poverty myself, because I don't quite know what it means."
"No doubt; and it would be unpleasant to be parted;--wouldn't it?"
She pressed his arm again as she went on. "You must judge between the two. What I want you to understand is this, that whatever you may judge to be right and best, I will agree to it, and will think that it is right and best. If you say that we will get ourselves married and try it, I shall feel that not to get ourselves married and not to try it is a manifest impossibility; and if you say that we should be wrong to get married and try it, then I will feel that to have done so was quite a manifest impossibility."
"No; but I'm a woman who loves well enough to be determined not to hurt the man she loves if she can help it."
"There is one thing on which I think we must decide."
"I must at any rate go out before we are married." Mary Lowther felt this to be a decision in her favour,--to be a decision which for the time made her happy and light-hearted. She had so dreaded a positive and permanent separation, that the delay seemed to her to be hardly an evil.
Harry Gilmore, the prosperous country gentleman, the county magistrate, the man of acres, the nephew of Mr. Chamberlaine, respected by all who knew him,--with the single exception of the Marquis of Trowbridge,--was now so much reduced that he felt himself to be an inferior being to Mr. Cockey, with whom he breakfasted. He had come to Loring, and now he was there he did not know what to do with himself. He had come there, in truth, not because he really thought he could do any good, but driven out of his home by sheer misery. He was a man altogether upset, and verging on to a species of insanity. He was so uneasy in his mind that he could read nothing. He was half-ashamed of being looked at by those who knew him; and had felt some relief in the society of Mr. Cockey till Mr. Cockey had become jovial with wine, simply because Mr. Cockey was so poor a creature that he felt no fear of him. But as he had come to Loring, it was necessary that he should do something. He could not come to Loring and go back again without saying a word to anybody. Fenwick would ask him questions, and the truth would come out. There came upon him this morning an idea that he would not go back home;--that he would leave Loring and go away without giving any reason to any one. He was his own master. No one would be injured by anything that he might do. He had a right to spend his income as he pleased. Everything was distasteful that reminded him of Bullhampton. But still he knew that this was no more than a madman's idea;--that it would ill become him so to act. He had duties to perform, and he must perform them, let them be ever so distasteful. It was only an idea, made to be rejected; but, nevertheless, he thought of it.