“Never.  Never, do you hear?  I couldn’t bear it.  Mother, Zora—­I couldn’t see them again.  Last night they nearly drove me into hysterics.  What do you suppose I came out for at this hour, if it wasn’t to avoid meeting them?  Let us go on.  If I die on the road, so much the better.”

“Perhaps,” said Septimus, “I could carry you.”

She softened, linked her arm in his, and almost laughed, as they started up the hill.

“What a good fellow you are, and I’ve been behaving like a beast.  Anyone but you would have worried me with questions—­and small wonder.  But you haven’t even asked me—­”

“Hush,” said Septimus.  “I know.  I saw the paragraph in the newspaper.  Don’t let’s talk of it.  Let us talk of something else.  Do you like honey?  The Great Bear put me in mind.  Wiggleswick wants to keep bees.  I tell him, if he does, I’ll keep a bear.  He could eat the honey, you see.  And then I could teach him to dance by playing the bassoon to him.  Perhaps he would like the bassoon,” he continued, after a pause, in his wistful way.  “Nobody else does.”

“If you had it with you now, I should love it for your sake,” said Emmy with a sob.

“If you would take my advice and rest in the cottage, I could send for it,” he replied unsmilingly.

“We must catch the train,” said Emmy.

In Wirley, half a mile further, folks were stirring.  A cart laden with market produce waited by a cottage door for the driver who stood swallowing his final cup of tea.  A bare-headed child clung round his leg, an attendant Hebe.  The wanderers halted.

“If the other cart could have taken us back to Nunsmere,” said Septimus, with the air of a man who has arrived at Truth, “this one can carry us to the station.”

And so it fell out.  The men made Emmy as comfortable as could be among the cabbages, with some sacks for rugs, and there she lay drowsy with pain and weariness until they came to the end of their journey.

A gas-light or two accentuated the murky dismalness of the little station.  Emmy sank exhausted on a bench in the booking hail, numb with cold, and too woebegone to think of her hair, which straggled limply from beneath the zibeline toque.  Septimus went to the booking office and asked for two first-class tickets to London.  When he joined her again she was crying softly.

“You’re coming with me?  It is good of you.”

“I’m responsible for you to Zora.”

A shaft of jealousy shot through her tears.

“You always think of Zora.”

“To think of her,” replied Septimus, vaguely allusive, “is a liberal education.”

Emmy shrugged her shoulders.  She was not of the type that makes paragons out of her own sex, and she had also a sisterly knowledge of Zora unharmonious with Septimus’s poetic conception.  But she felt too miserable to argue.  She asked him the time.