As I have told you, Mrs. Bays grew to respect Dic; and being willing to surrender, save for the shame of defeat, she honestly kept the terms of her armistice. Thus Rita and Dic enjoyed the sycamore divan by the river's edge without interference.
On the night before his departure he gave Rita the ring, saying, "This time it is for keeps."
"I hope so," returned the girl, with a touch of doubt in her hesitating words.
He spoke buoyantly of his trip and of the great things that were sure to come out of it, and again Rita softly hoped so; but intimated in a gentle, complaining tone of voice that something told her trouble would come from the expedition. She felt that she was being treated badly, though, being such a weak, selfish, unworthy person,—so she had been taught by her mother to believe,—she deserved nothing better. Dic laughed at her fears, and told her she was the one altogether perfect human being. Although by insistence he brought her to admit that he was right in both propositions, he failed to convince her in either, and she spoke little, save in eloquent sighs, during the remainder of the evening.
After the eventful night of Scott's social, Rita's surrender of self had grown in its sweetness hour by hour; and although Dic's love had also deepened, as his confidence grew apace he assumed an air of patronage toward the girl which she noticed, but which she considered quite the proper thing in all respects.
There was no abatement of his affection this last evening together, but she was sorry to see him so joyful at leaving her. Their situation was simply a repetition of the world-wide condition: the man with many motives and ambitions, the woman with one—love.
After Dic had, for the twentieth time, said he must be going, the girl whispered:—
"I fear you will carry away with you the memory of a dull evening, but I could not talk, I could not. Oh, Dic—" Thereupon she began to weep, and Dic, though pained, found a certain selfish joy in comforting her, compared to which the conversation of Madame de Staël herself would have been poor and commonplace. Then came the gate, a sweet face wet with tears, and good-by and good-by and good-by.
Dic went home joyful. Rita went to her room weeping. It pained him to leave her, but it grieved her far more deeply, and she began then to pay the penalty of her great crime in being a woman.
Do not from the foregoing remark conclude that Dic was selfish in his lack of pain at parting from Rita. He also lacked her fears. Did the fear exist in her and not in him because her love was greater or because she was more timid? Had her abject surrender made him over-confident? When a woman gives as Rita did she should know her man, else she is in danger. If he happens to be a great, noble soul, she makes her heaven and his then and there. If he is a selfish brute, she will find another place of which we all stand in wholesome dread.