She began to grow nervous. She had stooped to pick up the thread of flax and
was passing it slowly between her fingers. When he spoke again, his voice
showed that he shook like a man with a chill:
"I have said all I can say. I have offered all I have to offer. I am
waiting."
Still the silence lasted for the new awe of him that began to fall upon her.
In ways she could not fathom she was beginning to feel that a change had
come over him during these weeks of their separation. He used more
gentleness with her: his voice, his manner, his whole bearing, had finer
courtesy; he had strangely ascended to some higher level of character, and
he spoke to her from this distance with a sadness that touched her
indefinably--with a larger manliness that had its quick effect. She covertly
lifted her eyes and beheld on his face a proud passion of beauty and of pain
beyond anything that she had ever thought possible to him or to any man. She
quickly dropped her head again; she shifted her position; a band seemed to
tighten around her throat; until, in a voice hardly to be heard, she
murmured falteringly: "I have promised to marry Joseph."
He did not speak or move, but continued to stand leaning against the lintel
of the doorway, looking down on her. The colour was fading from the west
leaving it ashen white. And so standing in the dying radiance, he saw the
long bright day of his young hope come to its close; he drained to its dregs
his cup of bitterness she had prepared for him; learned his first lesson in
the victory of little things over the larger purposes of life, over the
nobler planning; bit the dust of the heart's first defeat and tragedy.
She had caught up the iron shears in her nervousness and begun to cut the
flaxen thread; and in the silence of the room only the rusty click was now
heard as she clipped it, clipped it, clipped it.
Then such a greater trembling seized her that she laid the shears back upon
the table. Still he did not move or speak, and there seemed to fall upon her
conscience--in insupportable burden until, as if by no will of her own, she
spoke again pitifully: "I didn't know that you cared so much for me. It isn't my fault. You had
never asked me, and he had already asked me twice."
He changed his position quickly so that the last light coming in through the
window could no longer betray his face. All at once his voice broke through
the darkness, so unlike itself that she started: "When did you give him this promise? I have no right to ask . . . when did
you give him this promise?"