Throughout the night he had intended to see Mr. Swancourt again,
but the sharp rebuff of the previous evening rendered such an
interview particularly distasteful. Perhaps there was another and
less honest reason. He decided to put it off. Whatever of moral
timidity or obliquity may have lain in such a decision, no
perception of it was strong enough to detain him. He wrote a note
in his room, which stated simply that he did not feel happy in the
house after Mr. Swancourt's sudden veto on what he had favoured a
few hours before; but that he hoped a time would come, and that
soon, when his original feelings of pleasure as Mr. Swancourt's
guest might be recovered.
He expected to find the downstairs rooms wearing the gray and
cheerless aspect that early morning gives to everything out of the
sun. He found in the dining room a breakfast laid, of which
somebody had just partaken.
Stephen gave the maid-servant his note of adieu. She stated that
Mr. Swancourt had risen early that morning, and made an early
breakfast. He was not going away that she knew of.
Stephen took a cup of coffee, left the house of his love, and
turned into the lane. It was so early that the shaded places
still smelt like night time, and the sunny spots had hardly felt
the sun. The horizontal rays made every shallow dip in the ground
to show as a well-marked hollow. Even the channel of the path was
enough to throw shade, and the very stones of the road cast
tapering dashes of darkness westward, as long as Jael's tent-nail.
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