Anthony Trollope: The Belton Estate

29. CHAPTER XXIX: THERE IS NOTHING TO TELL (continued)

'There is plenty of time yet.'

'Not too much if you mean to go out at all. Come, Clara, you had better write to him at once.'

'Write to whom? I don't know that I have any letter to write at all.' Then there was a pause. 'As far as I can see,' she said, 'I may give up writing altogether for the future, unless some day you may care to hear from me.'

'But you are not going away.'

'Not just yet if you will keep me. To tell you the truth, Mrs Askerton, I do not yet know where on earth to take myself.'

'Wait here till we turn you out.'

'I have got to put my house in order. You know what I mean. The job ought not to be a troublesome one, for it is a very small house.'

'I suppose I know what you mean.'

'It will not be a very smart establishment. But I must look it all in the face; must I not? Though it were to be no house at all, I cannot stay here all my life.'

'Yes, you may. You have lost Aylmer Park because you were too noble not to come to us.'

'No,' said Clara, speaking aloud, with bright eyes almost with her hands clenched. 'No I deny that.'

'I shall choose to think so for my own purposes. Clara, you are savage to me almost always savage; but next to him I love you better than all the world beside. And so does he. "It's her courage," he said to me the other day. "That she should dare to do as she pleases here, is nothing; but to have dared to persevere in the fangs of that old dragon," it was just what he said "that was wonderful!"'