Now he looked into a face from which the colour had ebbed and in which the eyes were far from radiant—but Morgan told himself that it should be his privilege to bring the bloom of happiness back, and his colossal self-confidence was not daunted by any serious misgiving.
It was not until they had entered the house and stood alone in the same room where Boone had listened to his edict of banishment, that she turned slowly and said in a voice both terrified and defiant:
"Morgan—I can't do it.... For God's sake release me from my promise!"
She stood facing him and braced for the recoil of that indignant protestation which she had every right to expect from him. She was not only withdrawing the promise upon which she had let him plan the entire edifice of his future, but doing so with a tardiness that made it, for him, inescapably conspicuous and mortifying.
But Morgan was a master of the strategy of surprise. His jaw did not drop in stricken amazement. His left hand, holding the glove just drawn from the right, did not clench in dramatic tensity. His eyes did not even smoulder into that suppressed rage which mischievously she used to tease into them for the pleasure of seeing them snap.
If anything, the prominent out-thrust of the clean-cut jaw was less emphatic than usual, and the girl felt the sinking helplessness of one who, keyed to a hard battle, launches the attack and encounters no opposition.
Morgan had seen the wild, almost irrational, terror of her eyes, and they had silenced argument. For once he recognized a defeat that he could avoid only by an ungenerous victory to which he could not bring himself, and he had no reproach because he could see that, in her effort to perform her promise, she had goaded herself to the breaking point.
His face showed every thoroughbred and manly quality of its blood as he inquired, with as great a deference as though her sudden announcement came with entire reasonableness: "Are you sure—you can't?"
When she had nodded her head miserably, Morgan argued his cause. He talked with a quiet and earnest eagerness but without reproach, as if he were for the first time pleading his love.
But the arguments held nothing new. She herself had lain awake at night repeating them until they were like parrot reiterations. They interposed no answer to the monstrous fact that a marriage which she faced in such unwillingness would be a thing that divorced the heart from the body. That she had so long beguiled herself into believing it possible, filled her now with self-scorn, but to the untimeliness of her decision he offered no protest.