CHAPTER XII
... I made answer to my friend: “Of a surety I have now set my feet on that point of life beyond the which he must not pass who would return.”
—The New Life, Dante.
“I ask you, Anna Mallison, to go out with me to my work in India in May, as my wife.”
Thus Keith Burgess, having recounted the story of the lights and leadings of the past twenty-four hours.
They were standing, and faced one another in a yellow beech wood where the sky above their heads was shut out by the sun-lightened paving of the clustering leaves.
As she came down the woodland path Anna had broken off a long stem of goldenrod, and she held it hung like an inverted torch at her side, like a sad vestal virgin at some ancient funeral rites.
“Forgive me for bringing this to you so swiftly. I know it seems hasty, perhaps unreasonably so. But to me no time or acquaintance, however extended, could change my wish. And, you see, my time is so very short, now!”
Keith Burgess looked with his whole soul’s sincerity into Anna’s face, and the integrity of his purpose, of his whole nature, could not be mistaken.
“It is not the suddenness, I think,” she replied slowly, with unconscious coldness; “like you, I feel that the great facts of God’s will and providence may be made clear to us instantly.”