They talked, all things considered, with surprising calmness, and at length Morgan glanced down and, seeing on the table near his hand the plans for the house they had meant to build, picked them up absently, glanced at them and tossed them back. It was the gesture of accepting a finality.
"I suppose, Anne," he said, with a rather more than merely decent assumption of whatever fault existed, "I've refused to see the truth because I was blindly selfish, but I couldn't seek to hold you—if it costs you both happiness and self-respect." He paused and then added. "I ask only one thing, now. Don't make this decision final. Think it over for three months—"
"Morgan dear," she interrupted in a gasping voice, "for more than three months, I've thought of nothing else."
"I know." The gentleness of his speech was the more telling by its contrast with his aggressive habit of self-assertion. "But you were thinking then with a sense of being bound. Complete freedom may make a difference. At least leave me that hope."
"I'm afraid," she faltered, "I'm very certain."
"Anyway," he reminded her, as he forced a rueful smile, "it will be easier to tell your mother in that fashion. She is on my side, you know."
Possibly Morgan had long ago counted this over-ardent advocacy on the part of Mrs. Masters as a hurtful partisanship. He knew that Anne's spirit had been fretted, ragged under the maternal insistence, even when it was tempered with finesse. He knew too that in this final declaration of freedom, the girl could not escape the knowledge that for her mother as well as herself she was wrecking every provident prospect and raising the ghosts of shabby, genteel poverty.
"I think," said Morgan, with a delicacy of tact which one would hardly have expected from him, "you'd better let me tell her—that we've decided to wait until I come back from abroad."
Anne sickened at the thought of her mother's disappointment and at the thought too of how, for her, the future was to be met. Then as if that were too gigantic a problem, her mind veered to lesser, yet disturbing, complications.
Today's papers had printed advance details of the wedding. The type of one heading seemed to stand at the moment before her eyes, "Happy Event of Interest to Society," but when she spoke somewhat timidly of these things to Morgan he contemptuously waved them aside.