she answered, her breath
coming more quickly, and her eye meeting his with a kind of antagonism
in it; 'but it is all sophistry. The only safety lies in following out
the plain duty. The parent wants the child's help and care, the child is
bound to give it; that is all it needs to know. If it forms new ties, it
belongs to them, not to the old ones; the old ones must come to be
forgotten and put aside.'

'So you would make all life a sacrifice to the past?' he cried,
quivering under the blow she was dealing him.

'No, not all life,' she said, struggling hard to preserve her perfect
calm of manner: he could not know that she was trembling from head to
foot. 'There are many for whom it is easy and right to choose their own
way; their happiness robs no one. There are others on whom a charge has
been laid from their childhood, a charge perhaps'--and her voice
faltered at last--'impressed on them by dying lips, which must govern,
possess their lives; which it would be baseness, treason, to betray. We
are not here only to be happy.'

And she turned to him deadly pale, the faintest, sweetest smile on her
lip. He was for the moment incapable of speech. He began phrase after
phrase, and broke them off. A whirlwind of feeling possessed him. The
strangeness, the unworldliness of what she had done struck him
singularly. He realised through every nerve that what she had just said
to him she had been bracing herself to say to him ever since their last
parting. And now he could not tell, or rather, blindly could not see,
whether she suffered in the saying it. A passionate protest rose in him,
not so much against her words as against her self-control. The man in
him rose up against the woman's unlooked-for, unwelcome strength.

But as the hot words she had dared so much in her simplicity to avert
from them both were bursting from him, they were checked by a sudden
physical difficulty. A bit of road was under water. A little beck,
swollen by the rain, had overflowed, and for a few yards' distance the
water stood about eight inches deep from hedge to hedge. Robert had
splashed through the flood half an hour before, but it had risen rapidly
since then. He had to apply his mind to the practical task of finding a
way to the other side.

'You must climb the bank,' he said, 'and get through into the field.'

She assented mutely. He went first, drew her up the bank, forced his way
through the loosely growing hedge himself, and holding bac