"’Twas at your aunt’s wish--not yours." "Anyway you came, and not being blind, you must have known what putting her into the ground meant to me." She stared at him coldly, but did not speak. The grief that Bartley had displayed above his mother’s coffin when it sank to earth was real enough. He had mourned her then from his heart. But while Rhoda watched the man weep on that mournful occasion, there had filled her mind, not sympathy at his present real grief, but sheer amazement at his past equally real levity. It was quite beyond her mental endowment to understand how the same man could laugh on the day after his mother’s death, and weep at the ceremony of her interment. Her thoughts now hardened her heart. She guessed that he was about to be personal and prepared to waste no consideration upon him. "You’ll be gone out of England soon, I suppose. What’s Miss Saunders going to do?" "Lord knows. My Aunt Susan’s been rather difficult since mother died. She wants to go to Canada with me; but--well, my mind’s set on somebody else." "You’ll never find anybody to care for you like she will." "Shan’t I? That’s bad news," he said. "And, what’s more, I’ll make so bold as to question it. Why should I waste time and beat about the bush? Look back a bit--to that day on the leat path, Rhoda. Well, a lot’s happened since then; but nothing has happened to my great love of you except it’s grown stronger and stronger. And you, Rhoda? Don’t say that you never thought of it again. Perhaps you blame me for holding off so long; but you see how I was placed. Couldn’t go on with it and mother fading out day by day." In the light of her knowledge she believed that this statement was untrue. At best the hypocrisy of it offended her. The man who played with Madge on the island was surely not the man to let his mother’s last illness interfere with love-making. But she did not comment upon this side of the question. She did not comment at all, but waited for him to make an end.