"You don't love him?"
"Not--that way. But sometimes--he makes me feel as if I couldn't
escape him--as if he would persist and persist, until he won. But I
don't want love to come to me that way. It seems to me that if one
loves, one knows. One doesn't have to be shown."
"My dear, sometimes it is a tragedy when a woman knows."
"But why?"
"Because men like to conquer. When they see love in a woman's eyes,
their own love--dies."
"I should hate a man like that," said Mary, frankly. "If a man only
loves you because of the conquest, what's going to happen when you are
married and the chase is over? No, Aunt Isabelle, when I fall in love,
it will be with a man who will know that I am the One Woman. He must
love me because I am Me--Myself. Not because some one else admires me,
or because I can keep him guessing. He will know me as I know him--as
his Predestined Mate!"
Thus spoke Sweet and Twenty, glowing. And Sweet and Forty, meeting
that flame with her banked fires, faltered. "But, my dear, how can you
know?"
"How did you know?"
The abrupt question drove every drop of blood from Aunt Isabelle's
face. "Who told you?"
"Mother. One night when I asked her why you had never married. You
don't mind, do you?"
Aunt Isabelle shook her head. "No. And, Mary, dear, I've faced all
the loneliness, all the dependence, rather than be untrue to that which
he gave me and I gave him. There was one night, in this old garden. I
was visiting your mother, and he was in Congress at the time, and the
garden was full of roses--and it was--moonlight. And we sat by the
fountain, and there was the soft splash of the water, and he said:
'Isabelle, the little bronze boy is throwing kisses at you--do you see
him--smiling?' And I said, 'I want no kisses but yours'--and that was
the last time. The next day he was killed--thrown from his horse while
he was riding out here to see--me.
"It was after that I was so ill. And something teemed to snap in my
head, and one day when I sat beside the fountain I found that I
couldn't hear the splash of the water, and things began to go; the
voices I loved seemed far away, and I could tell that the wind was
blowing only by the movement of the leaves, and the birds rounded out
their little throats--but I heard--no music----"