"We can't talk here," he said. "Come into the field."
"I don't wish to," she said, stubbornly. "I'm going home."
He fixed his eyes upon her. "You shall not go home," he said quietly, "till you have told me all about it." She sat immovable, her pouting under lip thrust out in a way that she had sometimes, in moments of obstinacy and displeasure. She did not meet his eyes. "Don't be childish," Paul said, pleasantly, after a moment. "You know you must tell me what it is."
She looked up reluctantly, and met his steady gaze, under which she turned first white, then red, and slowly, as if fascinated, rose from her seat. Yet still her words were unyielding. "We may as well have it out at once," she said, coldly.
Halleck could not repress a thrill of triumph. It was sweet to test his power over this beautiful, high-spirited girl, to feel her will, her intellect, like wax in his hands. But he tried not to show this consciousness in his face. She was in a strange mood; he did not understand her. Gravely and respectfully he helped her to scale the stone wall, which separated the meadow from the road. Her hand barely rested on his, and her eyes were averted carefully, but he paid no heed. He fastened the white pony to a tree, then slowly and thoughtfully followed Elizabeth across the field.
The noon-day sun beat down upon them in all its scorching brilliancy; it was pleasant to gain the shade of their usual trysting-place. Here the little brook, which had rippled and sparkled over stones and moss all the way from the mill-stream, formed itself into a quiet pool, over which weeping willows spread out long branches, and seemed to admire their own reflection in the cool green mirror beneath. Elizabeth took her usual seat on a fallen moss-covered log, drawing, as she did so, her white skirts about her, with what seemed an involuntary gesture of repulsion, and Halleck, who was about to place himself beside her, flushed and bit his lip. After a moment's hesitation, he threw himself down sullenly on the grass a little way off.
"Tell me," he said, in a tone that was the more determined for this little episode "tell me now what the matter is."
Elizabeth's eyes were fixed upon the cool, green water at her feet. "I don't know why you think," she said, slowly "that it has anything to do with you."
"Not when you are a full hour late for our appointment? Not when you treat me like an outcast? Oh, Elizabeth,"—the young man's voice softened suddenly, skillfully—"how can you trifle with me so, when I love you?"
He caught, or thought he did, a quiver in her face, although her eyes were still resolutely bent upon the pool. "Yes, I love you," he repeated. "I've loved you, I believe, ever since the day you came into that horrid, stuffy little room, looking like an angel—with that hair and that skin—so different from Amanda."—