"I think, after all, I'll go down and walk back with her," he said and Eben Tollman only nodded.
Leaving the house behind him, Stuart had silence except for the occasional call of a whippoorwill, and as he drew nearer to the sleepy darkness at the pines a clear and fragrant scent of honeysuckle came to his nostrils.
He guessed that in this sudden withdrawal to the isolation of the firs, Conscience had followed the same instinct that takes a wounded animal off, to be alone with its pain. So he approached with a noiseless caution abetted by the sound-deadening carpet of pine needles, searching the shadows for her unannounced and at first vainly.
In the sea of moonlit brightness this strip of trees afforded a margin of soft, almost sooty obscurity, save where here and there darts of light fell through the raggedness of the foliage.
Finally he saw her. She was seated on a rounded bowlder and both her hands were pressed tightly against her face. Her pose was rigid and unmoving; an attitude of distress and high-keyed misery of spirit.
Her thoughts were her own and safe from penetration, but their tenor was as obvious as though, instead of sitting alone in a stunned silence, she were proclaiming her crisis in Hamlet's resonant soliloquy.
There was a droop of surrender in her usually gallant shoulders and a limpness in her whole body which even the darkness did not entirely conceal. Within herself she admitted that her resolution had come to the condition of a stronghold so long besieged that it is no longer strong: where only the grim spirit of holding out against odds is left to keep the colors flying.
But perhaps if she could have a half hour of relief from the pitiful counterfeit of strength she might develop a fresh power of resistance. In all sieges there must be moments like that: moments when, if the enemy only knew, a quick assault would end the fight. If the enemy did not discover them, they passed without defeat.
Her young and splendid body seemed to her a temple out of which she had driven the love god, the deity of motherhood and the glowing lights of wholesome sex ... and where she had set up instead a pale allegiance of soulless form. Her life seemed a thing of quenched torches and unlit lamps.