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Updated: June 1, 2025
It was not wise, with that great Forest listening at their very doors, to speak so plainly. The forest edged up closer while they did so. And Mrs. Bittacy, anxious to interrupt the horrid spell, broke suddenly in upon it with a matter-of-fact suggestion. She did not like her husband's prolonged silence, stillness. He seemed so negative so changed.
"Sophie," he said softly, "you must remember, too, that in any case between us and and all that sort of thing there is a great gulf fixed, a gulf that cannot be crossed er while we are still in the body." And hearing no reply, he satisfied himself that she was already asleep and happy. But Mrs. Bittacy was not asleep.
But, after a little pause, during which she blew the light out, David Bittacy settling down to sleep with an excitement in his blood that was new and bewilderingly delightful, realized that perhaps he had not said quite enough to comfort her. She was lying awake by his side, still frightened. He put his head up in the darkness.
Its very right to existence seemed in question. Sanderson accordingly came down, and on the whole his short visit was a success. Why he came at all was a mystery to those who heard of it, for he never paid visits and was certainly not the kind of man to court a customer. There must have been something in Bittacy he liked. Mrs. Bittacy was glad when he left.
With the departure of Sanderson the significance of the curious incidents waned, because the moods that had produced them passed away. Mrs. Bittacy soon afterwards came to regard them as some growth of disproportion that had been very largely, perhaps, in her own mind. It did not strike her that this change was sudden for it came about quite naturally.
She prayed against it every night and morning: prayed that she might forget it that God would keep her husband safe from harm. For in spite of much surface foolishness that many might have read as weakness. Mrs. Bittacy had balance, sanity, and a fine deep faith. She was greater than she knew.
But the great New Forest hardly raised her sweeping skirts of black and purple shadow. Mr. Bittacy, however, knew intimately every detail of that wilderness of trees within. He knew all the purple coombs splashed with yellow waves of gorse; sweet with juniper and myrtle, and gleaming with clear and dark-eyed pools that watched the sky.
"Stevie," she cried below her breath, "look sharp, you lazy lump. Didn't you hear what Uncle David said? It'll come in and catch us before we've done!" They worked like Trojans, and, sitting beneath the wisteria tree that climbed the southern wall of the cottage, Mrs. Bittacy with her knitting watched them, calling from time to time insignificant messages of counsel and advice.
"In the spring perhaps," he answered gently, almost beneath his breath. "For they will not need me then. All the world can love them in the spring. It's in the winter that they're lonely and neglected. I wish to stay with them particularly then. I even feel I ought to and I must." And in this way, without further speech, the decision was made. Mrs. Bittacy, at least, asked no more questions.
One feels it here, I think, particularly." There was considerable tension in the air as he ceased speaking. Mr. Bittacy had not intended that the talk should go so far. They had drifted. He did not wish to see his wife unhappy or afraid, and he was aware acutely so that her feelings were stirred to a point he did not care about. Something in her, as he put it, was "working up" towards explosion.
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