"Yes, it will be very easy!" she whispered.
"Too easy!" said he, beginning to frown, "you are so helpless and
lonely, and I want you so bitterly, Cleone! Yes, it would be very
easy. But you taught me once, that a man must ever choose the harder
way, and this is the harder way, to love you, to long for you, and
to bid you--good-by!"
"Oh! Barnabas?"
"Ah, Cleone, you could make the wretchedest hut a paradise for me,
but for you, ah, for you it might some day become only a hut, and I,
only a discredited Amateur Gentleman, after all."
Then Barnabas sighed and thereafter frowned, and so bore her to the
chaise and setting her within, closed the door.
"Turn!" he cried to the postilion.
"Barnabas!"
But the word was lost in the creak of wheels and stamping of hoofs
as the chaise swung round; then Barnabas remounted and, frowning
still, trotted along beside it. Now in a while, lifting his sombre
gaze towards a certain place beside the way, he beheld the dim
outline of a finger-post, a very ancient finger-post which (though
it was too dark to read its inscription) stood, he knew, with
wide-stretched arms pointing the traveller:
TO LONDON.
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