When at last he was quite near her, he seemed for a little while to see nothing but the faint pale blue of her dress. He never forgot it afterward, and never remembered it without a sense of summer heat and languor. He could not have told what he said to her, or if he at first spoke at all. Soon she began to move down the path and he followed her,--simply followed her,--stopping when she stopped to break a flower from its stem. It was as she bent forward once that she told him of what she had done. "This morning," she said, "I went to see your mother." "She told me so," he answered. She broke the stem of the flower and stood upright, holding it in her hand. "You do not ask me why I went." "Why?" he asked. Their eyes met, and she was silent for a moment. Then she said, with perfect deliberateness: "I have known nothing of the life you live. I wanted to see it for myself. I wanted--to bring it near." He drew quite close to her, his face pale, his eyes burning. "Near!" he repeated. "To bring it near. Do you--do you know what you have said?" "To bring it near," she said again, with no less deliberateness than before, but with a strange softness. Just for to-day, she had told herself, she would try the sensation of being swept onward by the stream. But she weighed herself as she spoke, and weighed him and his passion, and her power against its force. But he came no closer to her. He did not attempt to touch even her hand or her dress. His own hands fell helplessly at his sides, and he stood still before her. "Oh, God!" he said in a hushed voice, "How happy I am!" CHAPTER XXXVIII. "GOD BLESS YOU!" Late the same night, Mrs. Haworth, who had been watching for her son alone in the grand, desolate room in which it was her lot to sit, rose to her feet on hearing him enter the house. The first object which met his eye when he came in was her little figure and her patient face turned toward the door. As he crossed the threshold, she took a few steps as if to meet him, and then stopped. "Jem!" she exclaimed. "Jem!" Her voice was tremulous and her eyes bright with the indefinable feeling which seized upon her the moment she saw his face. Her utterance of his name was a cry of anxiousness and fear. "What!" he said. "Are you here yet?" He came to her and laid a hand upon her shoulder in a rough caress. "You'd better go to bed," he said to her. "It's late, and I've got work to do." "I felt," she answered, "as if I'd like to wait an' see you. I knowed I should sleep better for it--I always do." There was a moment's pause in which she stroked his sleeve with her withered hand. Then he spoke. "Sleep better!" he said. "That's a queer notion. You've got queer fancies, you women--some on you." Then he stooped and kissed her awkwardly. He always did it with more or less awkwardness and lack of ease, but it never failed to make her happy.