“William, I wish you wouldn’t say these things,” said Mrs. Morel, very uncomfortable for the girl who walked beside her.
“But it doesn’t, mother. She’s very much in love with me now, but if I died she’d have forgotten me in three months.”
Mrs. Morel was afraid. Her heart beat furiously, hearing the quiet bitterness of her son’s last speech.
“How do you know?” she replied. “You don’t know, and therefore you’ve no right to say such a thing.”
“He’s always saying these things!” cried the girl.
“In three months after I was buried you’d have somebody else, and I should be forgotten,” he said. “And that’s your love!”
Mrs. Morel saw them into the train in Nottingham, then she returned home.
“There’s one comfort,” she said to Paul—“he’ll never have any money to marry on, that I am sure of. And so she’ll save him that way.”
So she took cheer. Matters were not yet very desperate. She firmly believed William would never marry his Gipsy. She waited, and she kept Paul near to her.
All summer long William’s letters had a feverish tone; he seemed unnatural and intense. Sometimes he was exaggeratedly jolly, usually he was flat and bitter in his letter.
“Ay,” his mother said, “I’m afraid he’s ruining himself against that creature, who isn’t worthy of his love—no, no more than a rag doll.”
He wanted to come home. The midsummer holiday was gone; it was a long while to Christmas. He wrote in wild excitement, saying he could come for Saturday and Sunday at Goose Fair, the first week in October.
“You are not well, my boy,” said his mother, when she saw him.
She was almost in tears at having him to herself again.
“No, I’ve not been well,” he said. “I’ve seemed to have a dragging cold all the last month, but it’s going, I think.”
It was sunny October weather. He seemed wild with joy, like a schoolboy escaped; then again he was silent and reserved. He was more gaunt than ever, and there was a haggard look in his eyes.
“You are doing too much,” said his mother to him. He was doing extra work, trying to make some money to marry on, he said. He only talked to his mother once on the Saturday night; then he was sad and tender about his beloved.
