The Choir Invisible

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?"