For some days after her unforgettable meeting with Daunt in the woods, Margaret had not left the house. She had spent much of her time reading to Lydia. There was a never lessening sorrow in the invalid’s gaze that affected her, full as was her mind of her own thoughts, and she had been glad to sit with her to escape the slow-burning fires that haunted her in Melwin’s opaque eyes.

She had almost a fear to venture beyond the shelter of this cheerless home—a fear of what she longed for unspeakably and as unspeakably dreaded. She told herself that Daunt was gone, that he had returned to the city, that she would not see him again at Warne. And yet her inmost wish belied the thought. He had gone away believing her cruel. The memory tortured her. An instinctive modesty, as innate as her conscience, had made it impossible for her to express in words the distinction which her own sensitiveness had drawn. To think of it was an intangible agony; to voice it was to penetrate the veiled sanctuary of her woman-soul.

But the afternoon following Melwin’s outburst in the dining-room, her flagging spirits and the smell of the cropped fields drew her out of doors. She was sore with a sense of reproach at her own unthinking blunder. Since then she had not seen Melwin. She felt how awkward would be the next meeting.

The sunlight splintered against low-sailing clumps of vapor which extended to the horizon, and the chill of the air prompted her to walk briskly. She did not take the wood road, but kept to the open country, following the maple-lined footpath that boarded the rusting hedgerows. There was little promise in the drooping, despondent sky. A shiver of wind was in the tall grasses and a far whistling of a flock of marsh-birds came to her over the moist fallow.

A darting chipmunk made her turn her head, and she became conscious that a figure was close behind her. An intuitive knowledge flashed upon her that it was Daunt. A vibrant thrill shot through her limbs and she felt her cheeks heating.

“Margaret! Margaret!”

She turned her head where he stood uncovered behind her. His left wrist was bound tightly with a black band, and he carried his arm thrust between the buttons of his jacket.

“I am disabled for riding, you see,” he said, smiling. “My wrist has gone lame on me. You see I am stopping at Tenbridge, and I walked over the hill.”

The ease and naturalness of his opening disarmed her. She caught herself smiling back at him.“I’m so sorry about your wrist,” she said. “Does it pain you much?”

“Only when I forget and use it. Did you think I would come back again?” This with blunt directness.

She made him no answer.

“Do you know, I have been here every day since I saw you. I’ve spent the hours haunting the road through the woods and tramping these paths between the fields.”

“I have not been out of the house since then,” she answered.

“Why not?”

“Can’t you guess why?”

“Were you afraid you might see me?”

“I—I didn’t know.”

“Look here, dear,” he said, “you know I don’t want to persecute you. If you will only tell me truly that you don’t love me, I will go away at once and never see you again. But I believe that there is no other thing in life worth setting against love. It means my happiness and yours, and it would be cowardly for me to give you up for anything but your happiness. Can’t we reason a little about it?”

She shook her head hopelessly. “It wouldn’t help. I have reasoned and reasoned, and it only makes me wretched.”

His brows knit perplexedly. He stopped and faced her in the path. “Do you think that I have come to you for any other reason than that I want you, that you mean more to me now than you ever did? That I love you more—more—since I know you love me wholly? You have loved me, absolutely. Now you are refusing to marry me! Why? Why? Why?”

Margaret’s flush had deepened. While he had been speaking, she had several times flung out her hand in mute protest. “Oh!” she said, “how can I make you understand? Love is strange and terrible. It isn’t enough to love with the earth-side of us! Why”—her voice vibrated with a little tremor—“I would love you just the same if I knew you had no soul—if there was only the human feel of you, and if I knew you must die like a dumb beast and not go to my heaven. If I knew that I should never see you again after this life, I would love you and long for you, just the same, now and afterward! Oh, there must be something wrong with my soul! That kind of a love is wrong. It’s the love of the flesh! Don’t you see? Can’t you see it’s wrong?”

Daunt struck savagely at the wiry beard-grasses with the stick he carried. This doubt was so irrational, so unwholesome to his healthy mind that to argue it filled him with a dumb anger. He groaned inwardly. She was impossible!

“You give no credit,” he slowly said at last, “to your humanity. In a woman of your soul-sensitiveness, it is unthinkable that the one should exist without the other. Soul and sense react upon each other. Bodily love, in people who possess spirituality, who are not mere clods, dependent upon their eyes and appetites for all life gives them, presupposes spiritual affinity. The physical may be the lesser side of us, but it is not necessarily the lower. Whatever there is in Nature is there because it ought to be. If we cannot see its beauty or its meaning, let us not blame Nature; let us blame ourselves.”

“Don’t think,” said Margaret, “that I haven’t thought all that! It is so easy to reason around to what we want to believe. It doesn’t make me happy to think as I do, but I can’t help it! We can’t make ourselves feel. I can’t! What good would it do me to make myself think I believed that? You would soon see what I lacked, and I would know it, and we would be chained to each other while our souls shrivelled. Oh,” she ended with almost a sob, “I am so utterly miserable!”

Daunt felt a mad desire to take that near-by form in his arms, to soothe her and comfort her. He felt as if she were squeezing his heart small with her hands. He was silent. Then his resentful will rose in an ungovernable flood.

“Do you suppose I intend to break my life in two for a quibble—for a baseless fancy? I tell you, you’re wrong! You’re wrong! You’ve tangled yourself up in a lot of sophistry! Don’t think I am going to give up. I won’t! You shall come to yourself! You shall! You shall!”

Margaret felt the leap of his will as an unbroken pacer the unexpected flick of a whip-thong. It was a new sensation. It had a tang of mastery, of domination, that was strange to her. She was unprepared for such a situation. She looked at him half stealthily. In the lines of his mouth there was an unfamiliar sovereignty. She felt that deliciousness of revolt which every strong woman feels at the first contact with an overbearing masculinity. A swift suggestion of the potentiality of his unyielding purpose stabbed her.

“And the rain descended and the floods came and the winds blew and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.” A flitting memory brought the parable to her mind. Could it be that the house of her defence was built upon the sands? “And the rain descended and the floods came and the winds blew”—the first promise of the tempest was in his eyes. A fear of yielding insinuated itself darkly. The set intentness of his obstinacy lingered after his words, hung about her in the air and pressed upon her with the weight of an unescapable necessity. Her breath strained her.

All at once she turned, speaking rapidly, incoherently. “Don’t—don’t talk to me like that! Don’t argue with me! I can’t bear it—now! I’m all at sea; I’m a ship without a captain. Don’t bend me; I was never made to be bent. I have got to think for myself. You must go away—indeed, you must! Somehow, to talk about it makes it so much worse. I can’t discuss it! Don’t ask me any more! Oh, I know you think I’m unreasonable. It sounds unreasonable sometimes, even to myself. I wish you wouldn’t blame me, but I know you must. You can’t help it. I blame myself, and I hurt myself, and the blame and the want and the hurt are all mixed up together! If you care—if you care anything for me, you will go away! You won’t come again. I hurt you when you do, and I can’t bear to do it.”

Daunt nodded, took her hand, held it a moment, and then released it. “Very well,” he said quietly and sadly. He did not offer to kiss her. The fire had died out of his voice and there was left only a constrained sorrow. But it had no note of despair. Its resignation was just as wilful as had been its assertive passion. He looked at her a moment lingeringly, then turned and vaulting the hedge, with squared shoulders and swinging stride, struck off across the stubble of the fields.

Margaret did not look back, but she knew he had not turned his head. Then a long sigh escaped her.

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