Lady Audleys Secret | Page 8

at all; pray do not leave off smoking. I only came up to look at the
sunset. What a lovely evening!"
"Yes, yes, I dare say," he answered, impatiently; "yet so long, so long!
Ten more interminable days and ten more weary nights before we
land."
"Yes," said Miss Morley, sighing. "Do you wish the time shorter?"

"Do I?" cried George. "Indeed I do. Don't you?"
"Scarcely."
"But is there no one you love in England? Is there no one you love
looking out for your arrival?"
"I hope so," she said gravely. They were silent for some time, he
smoking his cigar with a furious impatience, as if he could hasten the
course of the vessel by his own restlessness; she looking out at the
waning light with melancholy blue eyes--eyes that seemed to have
faded with poring over closely-printed books and difficult needlework;
eyes that had faded a little, perhaps, by reason of tears secretly shed in
the lonely night.
"See!" said George, suddenly, pointing in another direction from that
toward which Miss Morley was looking, "there's the new moon!"
She looked up at the pale crescent, her own face almost as pale and
wan.
"This is the first time we have seen it."
"We must wish!" said George. "I know what I wish."
"What?"
"That we may get home quickly."
"My wish is that we may find no disappointment when we get there,"
said the governess, sadly.
"Disappointment!"
He started as if he had been struck, and asked what she meant by
talking of disappointment.
"I mean this," she said, speaking rapidly, and with a restless motion of
her thin hands; "I mean that as the end of the voyage draws near, hope

sinks in my heart; and a sick fear comes over me that at the last all may
not be well. The person I go to meet may be changed in his feelings
toward me; or he may retain all the old feeling until the moment of
seeing me, and then lose it in a breath at sight of my poor wan face, for
I was called a pretty girl, Mr. Talboys, when I sailed for Sydney, fifteen
years ago; or he may be so changed by the world as to have grown
selfish and mercenary, and he may welcome me for the sake of my
fifteen years' savings. Again, he may be dead. He may have been well,
perhaps, up to within a week of our landing, and in that last week may
have taken a fever, and died an hour before our vessel anchors in the
Mersey. I think of all these things, Mr. Talboys, and act the scenes over
in my mind, and feel the anguish of them twenty times a day. Twenty
times a day," she repeated; "why I do it a thousand times a day."
George Talboys had stood motionless, with his cigar in his hand,
listening to her so intently that, as she said the last words, his hold
relaxed, and the cigar dropped in the water.
"I wonder," she continued, more to herself than to him, "I wonder,
looking back, to think how hopeful I was when the vessel sailed; I
never thought then of disappointment, but I pictured the joy of meeting,
imagining the very words that would be said, the very tones, the very
looks; but for this last month of the voyage, day by day, and hour by
hour my heart sinks and my hopeful fancies fade away, and I dread the
end as much as if I knew that I was going to England to attend a
funeral."
The young man suddenly changed his attitude, and turned his face full
upon his companion, with a look of alarm. She saw in the pale light that
the color had faded from his cheek.
"What a fool!" he cried, striking his clinched fist upon the side of the
vessel, "what a fool I am to be frightened at this? Why do you come
and say these things to me? Why do you come and terrify me out of my
senses, when I am going straight home to the woman I love; to a girl
whose heart is as true as the light of Heaven; and in whom I no more
expect to find any change than I do to see another sun rise in
to-morrow's sky? Why do you come and try to put such fancies in my

head when I am going home to my darling wife?"
"Your wife," she said; "that is different. There is no reason that my
terrors should terrify you. I am going to England to rejoin a man to
whom I was engaged to be married fifteen years ago. He was too poor
to marry then, and when I was offered a situation