They walked together in silence; while a boy from the village led Faversham’s horse some distance in the rear.  All that Faversham had meant to say had dropped away from him.  His planned defence of himself could find no voice.

“You too blame me?” he said, at last, hoarsely.

She shook her head sadly.

“I don’t know what to think.  But when we last met—­you were so hopeful—­”

“Yes—­like a fool.  But what can you do—­with a madman.”

“Can you bear—­to be still in his employ?”

She looked up, her beautiful eyes bright and challenging.

“Mainstairs is not the whole estate.  If I’m powerless here—­I’m not elsewhere—­”

She was silent.  He turned upon her.

“If you are to misunderstand and mistrust me—­then indeed I shall lose heart!”

The feeling, one might almost say the anguish, in his dark, commanding face moved her strangely.  Condemnation and pity—­aye, and something else than pity—­struggled within her.  For the first time Lydia began to know herself.  She was strangely shaken.

“I will try—­and understand,” she said in a voice that trembled.

“All my power of doing anything depends on it!” he said, passionately.  “I can say truly that things would have been infinitely worse if I had not been here.  And I have worked like a horse to better them—­before you came.”

She was silent.  His appeal to her as to his judge hurt her poignantly.  Yet what could she do or say?  Her natural longing was to console; but where were the elements of consolation? Could anything be worse than what she had seen and heard?

The mingled emotion which silenced her, warned her not to continue the conversation.  She perceived the opening of a side-lane leading back to the river and the Keswick road.

“This is my best way, I think,” she said, pausing, and holding out her hand.  “The pony-cart is waiting for me at Whitebeck.”

He looked at her in distress, yet also in anger.  A friend might surely have stood by him more cordially, believed in him more simply.

“You are at home again?  I may come and see you.”

“Please!  We shall want to hear.”

Her tone was embarrassed.  They parted almost coldly.

Lydia walked quickly home, down a sloping lane from which the ravines of Blencathra, edge behind edge, chasm beyond chasm, were to be seen against the sunset, and all the intermediate landscape—­wood, and stubble, and ferny slope—­steeped in stormy majesties of light.  But for once the quick artist sense was shut against Nature’s spectacles.  She walked in a blind anguish of self-knowledge and self-scorn.  She who had plumed herself on the poised mind, the mastered senses!

She moaned to herself.

“Why didn’t he tell me—­warn me!  To sell himself to that man—­to act for him—­defend him—­apologize for him—­and for those awful, awful things!  An agent must.”