"Go now...." she managed to whisper.
"But you believe me? You will still call me your friend?"
"Yes ... my dear, dear friend."
He went quickly from the room. He vowed to himself that he would be her true friend at no matter what cost to his own feelings. But he had never loved her as he loved her in that hour. And underneath it all there was hope, hope, hope—— He could wait. Yes, he could wait long years more, if need be.
XXXVII
Sophy stood by the open window of her old nursery bedroom at Sweet-Waters. It was only ten o'clock, but she had come up early this first evening. She wanted to be alone. Now that she had told Charlotte and the Judge how things were with her, it was a strain to live up to their pained conception of the situation. She felt it a reproach that in spite of all, such an irrepressible fount of glee bubbled within her. It was not happiness certainly, yet too much akin to it not to be out of keeping with her present outward state. Her heart would sing in spite of her. It was like a naughty, overexuberant child shouting week-a-day songs at a funeral. It sang: "I am free! I am free! I am free!" The sky was spread with clouds. Behind these clouds was a hidden moon. Its rays filtered through, and this soft, grey moonlight was eerily lovely—elfin-like.
From this pale fleece of cloud fell a light shower, trilling on the roof of the east wing beneath her window. And from field and wood and hill went up another trilling, exquisitely musical and plaintive—the clear, sweet, myriad flutes of autumn crickets. So that heaven and earth seemed doubly woven together by this interlacing of lovely sound, the one descending, the other ascending.
The rain came softly in her face. She held up her face to it, loving the delicate, cool touch upon her lips and eyelids.
As usual, Sweet-Waters had given her to herself again. She was just Sophy Taliaferro once more. Sophy Chesney and Sophy Loring were poor, wind-driven waifs, somewhere far away in the outer deserts of her mind. To-morrow Charlotte and Joe wished "to talk very seriously with her." This had been Charlotte's parting word that night. Well—to-morrow was twelve hours away. Now she would just be Sophy Taliaferro.