"Ima!"
"—Why cried I 'this to happen!' Because by thy kiss I saw that I was nothing to thee—and less than nothing. All my poor trying suddenly proved of no avail. All my poor fancy that haply thou mightst turn to me if I could be worthy of thee suddenly gone to dust that the winds sport. Why cried I 'ended that!'—"
She sighed very deeply. Her trembling had in some degree communicated itself to him. He trembled for the shame he knew she must be suffering, and for the effect upon him that her gentle, even voice had, crooning its tragedy in the darkness of their remote and silent situation, and for the effect upon him of that long sigh—rising and then falling away to tiniest sound, as it had been the passing of some spirit released to glide away across the bracken.
"—Why cried I 'ended that'?" and then her long, sad sigh; and then: "Because all is nought, little master;" and he saw her fingers extend and her head bow a little....
She arose then, slowly, and he went back to give her room. Her hair had slipped the last coil that held it, and was in a black sheen to her waist before one shoulder and in a black sheen to her waist behind her back. She began to loop it up with deft but tired fingers and looked at him while she twined it. Her face was very kind to him; the stars caught it, and he saw those stars upon her mild mouth that had tricked him to his wanton act: they seemed to show her almost smiling at him.
He asked: "Are we going now?"
She smiled then, gently. "Nay," she said. "I have left my poor secrets here—suffer me to go alone." Then turned and left him; and he watched her form swiftly merging to the darkness—now high among the bracken, now lower and lower yet, as though it were a deepening pool she entered. Now gone.
III
It seemed to Percival, left alone, as if some horrible and most oppressive trouble had befallen him. This piteous thing had struck so suddenly that for some moments he remained only numbed by it, as numbness precedes the onset of pain from a blow. When the full meaning returned to him, "Good God!" he cried aloud, "What a thing to have happened!" and most tenderly—with increasing tenderness, with increasing grief—he went through all she had revealed and how she had revealed it. It was surely the most monstrous pitiful thing that ever could be, her secret plots and strivings to fit herself for what she yearned—tasking herself in "gentle ways," in speech of his fashion, in hard books, in the life between walls and under roofs; he ached for her in every bone as he thought of her thus schooling herself—for him. "Oh, horrible, horrible!" he muttered, writhing for her to remember all her little cares for him—her attention to his clothes, her concern that he should not get into "rough ways"; horrible! horrible! now that he knew their loving purpose. And then her revelation of it! He must rise and pace, the better to endure the recollection of that. How terribly she struggled in his arms! "God, what a beast a man can be!" he cried. What agony must have wrung that cry, "Ah, Percival, how you must despise me!" What agony that "This to happen!" What pain, what bleeding of her heart, that lamentable ending—"Because all is naught, little master!" Happy, happy time when first she used to call him by that quaint endearment; in what travail, in what blackness, it had come from her now! What had she done? Why fastened such a love upon him whose love was utterly pledged away? Nay, the torment was What had he done? What vile and brutal ends had he used to knock her to her senses? What manner of sympathy had he given her when she lay bleeding?
"I must go to her," he said abruptly; and at the best speed the darkness would admit he twisted his way through the paths among the bracken towards the distant nest of lights.