Chance

An immense anguish of the present wrung her heart, and she nearly cried

aloud. That dread of what was before her which had been eating up her

courage slowly in the course of odious years, flamed up into an access of

panic, that sort of headlong panic which had already driven her out twice

to the top of the cliff-like quarry. She jumped up saying to herself:

"Why not now? At once! Yes. I'll do it now--in the dark!" The very

horror of it seemed to give her additional resolution.

She came down the staircase quietly, and only on the point of opening the

door and because of the discovery that it was unfastened, she remembered

Captain Anthony's threat to stay in the garden all night. She hesitated.

She did not understand the mood of that man clearly. He was violent. But

she had gone beyond the point where things matter. What would he think

of her coming down to him--as he would naturally suppose. And even that

didn't matter. He could not despise her more than she despised herself.

She must have been light-headed because the thought came into her mind

that should he get into ungovernable fury from disappointment, and

perchance strangle her, it would be as good a way to be done with it as

any.

"You had that thought," I exclaimed in wonder.

With downcast eyes and speaking with an almost painstaking precision (her

very lips, her red lips, seemed to move just enough to be heard and no

more), she said that, yes, the thought came into her head. This makes

one shudder at the mysterious ways girls acquire knowledge. For this was

a thought, wild enough, I admit, but which could only have come from the

depths of that sort of experience which she had not had, and went far

beyond a young girl's possible conception of the strongest and most

veiled of human emotions.

"He was there, of course?" I said.

"Yes, he was there." She saw him on the path directly she stepped

outside the porch. He was very still. It was as though he had been

standing there with his face to the door for hours.

Shaken up by the changing moods of passion and tenderness, he must have

been ready for any extravagance of conduct. Knowing the profound silence

each night brought to that nook of the country, I could imagine them

having the feeling of being the only two people on the wide earth. A row

of six or seven lofty elms just across the road opposite the cottage made

the night more obscure in that little garden. If these two could just

make out each other that was all.