An hour later Boone stood alone with Anne in the room where he had been overthrown and rehabilitated.
"I ought to take you across to Aunt Judy's house," he told her in a weary voice. "I don't suppose you should be left here—with me—like this—for what's left of the night. Until now there's been company enough."
The girl shook her head wearily. "I'd fall off of a horse," she said. "I'm too tired to ride. I'm going back up those stairs—"
The man moved a step forward.
"Joe Gregory is coming back," he explained, "but it will probably be near to dawn before he gets here."
As she reached the stairway she halted impulsively with her hand on the latch, and stood poised there with an expression of baffling, half-eager expectancy. The sensitive beauty of her face and the slender grace of her body seemed for a moment to cast aside their fatigue and to invite him, but Boone stood resolutely the width of the room away.
Had he known it, that was a moment in which he might have grasped a more vital rehabilitation. Had he then offered again the explanation for which he had once been denied opportunity, her readiness to hear him would have been eager. At that moment she was once more his for the taking. He need only have extended his arms and said, "Come!" and she would have responded instantly and gladly. She was receptive, stirred, but one thing her pride still inhibited. She could not make the advances.
Boone let his moment pass; let it pass unrecognized with the blindness of life's perverse coincidence. At that precise instant, a mood was upon him which was no intrinsic reflection of his own spirit, but rather the reflection of all the stormy transitions of the night.
She had seen him at a crisis when he had been on the verge of collapse like a bridge whose centre rests upon a span of flawed steel. True, he had not actually collapsed, but, save for her intervention, he would have done so. Now his mortification withered him and perversely expressed itself in resentment against her—for having witnessed his shame.
He owed her everything—so much that his self-respect was bankrupted—and if he could have hated her, he would have hated her just then. He even fancied that he did. He saw in her a cold, impersonal deity, consciously superior to himself and secretly triumphant over his weakness. So he not only let the moment pass, but he rebuffed its unspoken invitation.