"You have never spoken aught else to any human soul. That I know."
"And yet you try to evade the truth? Why deceive your heart about it, since I have not deceived my own? I have faced it out in my own heart, and I have, I trust, come off the victor. At some cost!"
Her face was troubled. She looked aside as she replied in a voice low, but firm: "Any woman would be glad to hear such words from Captain Lewis, and I am glad. But--the honest wife never lived who could listen to them often."
"I know that," he said simply.
"No!" Her voice was very low now; her eyes soft and cast down as they fell upon a ring under her glove. "We must not meet, Captain Meriwether Lewis. At least, we must not meet thus alone in the woods. It might cause talk. The administration has enemies enough, as you know--and never was a woman who did not have enemies, no matter how clean her life has been."
"Clean as the snow, yours! I have never asked you to be aught else, and never will. I sought you once, when I rode from Virginia to New York--when I first had my captain's pay, before Mr. Jefferson asked me to join his family. Before that time I had too little to offer you; but then, with my hopes and my ambitions, I ventured. I made that journey to offer you my hand. I was two weeks late--you were already wedded to Mr. Alston. Then I learned that happiness never could be mine.... Yes, we must part! You are the only thing in life I fear. And I fear as well for you. One wagging tongue in this hotbed of gossip--and there is harm for you, whom all good men should wish to shield."
As he rode, speaking thus, his were the features of a man of tremendous emotions, a resolute man, a man of strength, of passions not easily put down.
She turned aside her own face for an instant. At last her little hand went to him in a simple gesture of farewell. Meriwether Lewis leaned and kissed it reverently as he rode.
"Good-by!" said he. "Now we may go on for the brief space that remains for us," he added a moment later. "No one is likely to ride this way this morning. Let us go on to the old mill. May I give you a cup of coffee there?"
"I trust Captain Meriwether Lewis," she replied.
They advanced silently, and presently came in sight of a little cascade above a rocky shallowing of the stream. Below this, after they had splashed through the ford, they saw the gray stone walls of Rock Creek Mill.