“In Plattville.”
“In Plattville?” He turned now, astounded.
“Yes; wouldn't you have taken me on the 'Herald'?” She rose and came toward him. “I could have supported myself here if you would—and I've studied how newspapers are made; I know I could have earned a wage. We could have made it a daily.” He searched in vain for a trace of raillery in her voice; there was none; she seemed to intend her words to be taken literally.
“I don't understand,” he said. “I don't know what you mean.”
“I mean that I want to stay here; that I ought to stay here; that my conscience tells me I should—but I can't and it makes me very unhappy. That was why I acted so badly.”
“Your conscience!” he cried.
“Oh, I know what a jumble and puzzle it must seem to you.”
“I only know one thing; that you are going away to-morrow morning, and that I shall never see you again.”
The darkness had grown heavy. They could not see each other; but a wan glimmer gave him a fleeting, misty view of her; she stood half-turned away from him, her hand to her cheek in the uncertain fashion of his great moment of the afternoon; her eyes-he saw in the flying picture that he caught—were adorably troubled and her hand trembled. She had been irresistible in her gaiety; but now that a mysterious distress assailed her, the reason for which he had no guess, she was so divinely pathetic; and seemed such a rich and lovely and sad and happy thing to have come into his life only to go out of it; and he was so full of the prophetic sense of loss of her—it seemed so much like losing everything—that he found too much to say to be able to say anything.
He tried to speak, and choked a little. A big drop of rain fell on his bare head. Neither of them noticed the weather or cared for it. They stood with the renewed blackness hanging like a thick drapery between them.