“Oh, Zyp!” I cried aloud in great pain. “You know it isn’t—you know it isn’t!”
I couldn’t help this one cry. It was forced from me.
“Then what’s the reason?”
“I can’t give it—I have none. I want to be alone, that’s all.”
She stood looking at me a moment in silence, and the line of her mouth hardened.
“Very well,” she said, at last. “Then, understand, I’ve done with you. I thought at first it was a mistake or that you were ill again. I’ve been kind to you; you can’t say I haven’t given you a chance. And I pitied you because you were alone and unhappy. Jason, I will tell you, hinted an evil thing of you to me, but even if it was true, which I didn’t believe, I forgave you, thinking, perhaps, it was done for my sake. Well, if it was, I tell you now it was useless, for you will be nothing to me ever again.”
And, with these cruel words, she left me. The proud child of the woods could brook no insult to her condescension, and from my comrade she had become my enemy.
I suppose I should have been relieved that the inevitable rupture had occurred so swiftly and effectually. Judge you, you poor outcasts who, sanctifying a love in your tumultuous breasts, have had to step aside and yield to another the fruit you so coveted.
Once pledged to antagonism, Zyp, it will be no matter for wonder, adopted anything but half-measures. Had it only been her vanity that was hurt she would have made me pay dearly for the blow. As it was, her ingenuity in devising plans for my torture and discomfiture verged upon the very bounds of reason.
At first she contented herself with mere verbal pleasantries and disdainful snubbings. As, however, the days went on and my old strength and health obstinately returned to me, despite the irony of the shattered soul within, her animosity grew to be an active agent so persistent in its methods that I verily thought my brain would give way under the load.