This visit must be the last time she should meet her love. She must tell
him, implore him--he who was free and master of his life; he must go
away, must promise not to follow her, must help her to do what was right
and just. She had no sentimental feeling of personal wickedness now. How
could it be wicked to love--to love truly and tenderly? She had not
sought love; he had come upon her. It would be wicked to give way to her
feelings, to take Hector for a lover; but she had no sense of being a
wicked woman as things were, any more than if she had badly burned her
hand and was suffering deeply from the wound; she would have considered
herself wicked for having had the mischance thus to injure herself. She
was intensely unhappy, and she was going to try and do what was right.
That was all. And God and those kind angels who steered the barks beyond
the rocks would perhaps help her.
Hector for his part, had retired to rest boiling with passion and rage,
the subtle, odious insinuations of Mildred ringing in his ears. The
remembrance of the menace on Morella's dull face as she had watched
Theodora depart, and, above all, Wensleydown's behavior as they all said
good-night: nothing for him actually to take hold of, and yet enough to
convulse him with jealous fury.
Oh, if she were only his own! No man should dare to look at her like
that. But Josiah had stood by and not even noticed it.
Passionate jealousy is not a good foster-parent for prudence.
The Sunday came, and with it a wild, mad longing to be near her
again--never to leave her, to prevent any one else from so much as
saying a word. Others besides Wensleydown had begun to experience the
attraction of her beauty and charm. If considerations of wisdom should
keep him from her side, he would have the anguish of seeing these
others take his place, and that he could not suffer.
And as passion in a man rages higher than in the average woman,
especially passion when accelerated by the knowledge of another's desire
to rob it of its own, so Hector's conclusions were not so clear as
Theodora's.
He dared not look ahead. All he was conscious of was the absolute
determination to protect her from Wensleydown--to keep her for himself.
And fate was gathering all the threads together for an inevitable
catastrophe, or so it seemed to the Crow when the long, exquisite June
Sunday evening was drawing to a close and he looked back on the day.