"Oh, it is too soon, too soon."
He stood a moment looking at her with his deep eyes.
"I shall come back," he said.
"No, oh, no!"
She hid her face in her hands, and bent her head to the marble. What he offered was not for her; for other women, for happier women, for better women, perhaps, but not for her.
When she raised her head he was gone.
The momentary, unreasonable agitation passed away from her, leaving her cold as a stone, and she knew what she had done. By a lightning flash her own heart stood revealed to her. How incredible it seemed, but she knew that it was true: all this dreary time, when the personal thought had seemed so far away from her, her greatest personal experience had been silently growing up—no gourd of a night, but a tree to last through the ages. She, who had been so strong for others, had failed miserably for herself.
Love and happiness had come to her open-handed, and she had sent them away. Love and happiness? Oh, those will o' the wisps had danced ere this before her cheated sight. Love and happiness? Say rather, pity and a mild peace. It is not love that lets himself be so easily denied.
Happiness? That was not for such as she; but peace, it would have come in time; now it was possible that it would never come at all.
All the springs of her being had seemed for so long to be frozen at their source; now, in this one brief moment of exaltation, half-rapture, half-despair, the ice melted, and her heart was flooded with the stream.