They stopped to part among the Scotch firs.
“Then my life will be filled with hope, Maggie,
and I shall be happier than other men, in spite of
all? We do belong to each other—for
always—whether we are apart or together?”
“Yes, Philip; I should like never to part; I
should like to make your life very happy.”
“I am waiting for something else. I wonder
whether it will come.”
Maggie smiled, with glistening tears, and then stooped
her tall head to kiss the pale face that was full
of pleading, timid love,—like a woman’s.
She had a moment of real happiness then,—a
moment of belief that, if there were sacrifice in
this love, it was all the richer and more satisfying.
She turned away and hurried home, feeling that in
the hour since she had trodden this road before, a
new era had begun for her. The tissue of vague
dreams must now get narrower and narrower, and all
the threads of thought and emotion be gradually absorbed
in the woof of her actual daily life.
The Cloven Tree
Secrets are rarely betrayed or discovered according
to any programme our fear has sketched out. Fear
is almost always haunted by terrible dramatic scenes,
which recur in spite of the best-argued probabilities
against them; and during a year that Maggie had had
the burthen of concealment on her mind, the possibility
of discovery had continually presented itself under
the form of a sudden meeting with her father or Tom
when she was walking with Philip in the Red Deeps.
She was aware that this was not one of the most likely
events; but it was the scene that most completely
symbolized her inward dread. Those slight indirect
suggestions which are dependent on apparently trivial
coincidences and incalculable states of mind, are the
favorite machinery of Fact, but are not the stuff
in which Imagination is apt to work.
Certainly one of the persons about whom Maggie’s
fears were furthest from troubling themselves was
her aunt Pullet, on whom, seeing that she did not
live in St. Ogg’s, and was neither sharp-eyed
nor sharp-tempered, it would surely have been quite
whimsical of them to fix rather than on aunt Glegg.
And yet the channel of fatality—the pathway
of the lightning—was no other than aunt
Pullet. She did not live at St. Ogg’s,
but the road from Garum Firs lay by the Red Deeps,
at the end opposite that by which Maggie entered.
The day after Maggie’s last meeting with Philip,
being a Sunday on which Mr. Pullet was bound to appear
in funeral hatband and scarf at St. Ogg’s church,
Mrs. Pullet made this the occasion of dining with
sister Glegg, and taking tea with poor sister Tulliver.
Sunday was the one day in the week on which Tom was
at home in the afternoon; and today the brighter spirits
he had been in of late had flowed over in unusually
cheerful open chat with his father, and in the invitation,
