"I'm in the carriage," Ivo pointed out.
"Yes," said Rosamund, and looked at him, and the strange brief smile came and went. "I noticed."
XII.
The frost came in the second week of December, hard and sudden, out of a clear sky.
The fen went white overnight. Every blade of sedge along the dykes stood up stiff and furred with rime, and the pollard willows were silver to their tips, and the Lode, which had been brown and full all November, went first to a dull pewter and then, on the third morning, to ice.
Ivo had not gone back to Scotland. He had written to Edinburgh and resigned his post, and written to Lockyer in London and asked him to come down after Christmas, and Lockyer had written back that he would, and that he was glad—underlined twice—to be asked. The cause was set down at Doctors' Commons for Hilary term, and Mr. Voysey and Mr. Lusk were exchanging letters of exquisite courtesy and great length. The engine at Lode End beat on. Jethro Scarth's cottage still stood. Rosamund had paid for a new roof on it out of the trust, the first money she had directed, and had written the entry in the trust ledger herself, in her small upright hand, under the date.
She still wore black. She would wear it, she said, until October. The signet ring had come back from the jeweller in Huntingdon made small, and she wore it on her finger now and not on a string; but she slept in the blue room at the end of the east gallery, and he in the old man's room, and they met at breakfast and in the study and on the fen, and called each other by their names, and that was all. He had not asked for more. He had told her in the vestry that he would ask nothing, and he found he wanted her to be the one who did.
On the third afternoon of the frost she found him on the Lode bank below the house, standing at the edge of the ice with a pair of old Dutch skates hanging from his hand by their straps.
"Mrs. Allard found them in the gun room," he said, without turning. He knew her step by now. "They were his. I think they're the ones he taught me on. I'd forgotten they were so small."
She came and stood beside him. The sun was going down red and enormous over the flat land, laying a long road of copper across the ice, and the cold was the kind that made the inside of the nose ache.