there in the window where she could see him
come, was keeping him from her, she went into her bedroom. From there
she could watch the sunset clouds wine-dark over the river. A little
talking wind shivered along the houses; the dusk began creeping in. She
would not turn on the light, unwilling to admit that it was really
getting late, but began to change her dress, lingering desperately over
every little detail of her toilette, deriving therefrom a faint,
mysterious comfort, trying to make herself feel beautiful. From sheer
dread of going back before he came, she let her hair fall, though it was
quite smooth and tidy, and began brushing it. Suddenly she thought with
horror of her efforts at adornment--by specially preparing for him, she
must seem presumptuous to Fate. At any little sound she stopped and
stood listening--save for her hair and eyes, as white from head to foot
as a double narcissus flower in the dusk, bending towards some faint tune
played to it somewhere oft in the fields. But all those little sounds
ceased, one after another--they had meant nothing; and each time, her
spirit returning--within the pale walls of the room, began once more to
inhabit her lingering fingers. During that hour in her bedroom she lived
through years. It was dark when she left it.

CHAPTER XVI

When Miltoun at last came it was past nine o'clock.

Silent, but quivering all over; she clung to him in the hall; and this
passion of emotion, without sound to give it substance, affected him
profoundly. How terribly sensitive and tender she was! She seemed to
have no armour. But though so stirred by her emotion, he was none the
less exasperated. She incarnated at that moment the life to which he
must now resign himself--a life of unending tenderness, consideration,
and passivity.

For a long time he could not bring himself to speak of his decision.
Every look of her eyes, every movement of her body, seemed pleading with
him to keep silence. But in Miltoun's character there was an element of
rigidity, which never suffered him to diverge from an objective once
determined.

When he had finished telling her, she only said:

"Why can't we go on in secret?"

And he felt with a sort of horror that he must begin his struggle over
again. He got up, and threw open the window. The sky was dark above the
river; the wind had risen. That restless murmuration, and the width of
the night with its scattered stars, seemed to c