she
went quickly up the steps. Before she could reach the door he
confronted her again; he pressed his back against it. She
stretched out her hand and rang the bell. He stepped aside very
quickly--proudly. She entered, closing and locking noiselessly the
door that no sound might reach the servant she had summoned. As
she did so she heard him try the knob and call to her in an
undertone of last reproach and last entreaty:

"_Isabel!--Isabel!--Isabel_!"

Hurrying through the hall, she ran silently up the stairs to her
room and shut herself in.

Her first feeling was joy that she was there safe from him and from
every one else for the night. Her instant need was to be alone.
It was this feeling also that caused her to go on tiptoe around the
room and draw down the blinds, as though the glimmering windows
were large eyes peering at her with intrusive wounding stare. Then
taking her position close to a front window, she listened. He was
walking slowly backward and forward on the pavement reluctantly,
doubtfully; finally he passed through the gate. As it clanged
heavily behind him, Isabel pressed her hands convulsively to her
heart as though it also had gates which had closed, never to reopen.

Then she lighted the gas-jets beside the bureau and when she caught
sight of herself the thought came how unchanged she looked. She
stood there, just as she had stood before going down to supper,
nowhere a sign of all the deep displacement and destruction that
had gone on within.

But she said to herself that what he had told her would reveal
itself in time. It would lie in the first furrows deepening down
her cheeks; it would be the earliest frost of years upon her hair.

A long while she sat on the edge of the couch in the middle of the
room under the brilliant gaslight, her hands forgotten in her lap,
her brows arched high, her eyes on the floor. Then her head
beginning to ache, a new sensation for her, she thought she should
bind a wet handkerchief to it as she had often done for her aunt;
but the water which the maid had placed in the room had become
warm. She must go down to the ewer in the hall. As she did so,
she recollected her shawl.

It was lying on the wet grass where it had fallen. There was a
half-framed accusing thought that he might have gone for it; but
she put the thought away; the time had passed for courtesies from
him. When she stooped for the shawl, an owl flew viciously at her,
snapping