The Fruit of the Tree

by Edith Wharton

Amherst's brows darkened. "It is not so with mine," he began; but she raised her hand with a silencing gesture.

"I know you have tried your best that it should not be so; and perhaps you have succeeded better than I. But I am tired, horribly tired—I want to get away from everything!"

She saw a look of pain in his eyes. He continued to lean against the mantel-shelf, his head slightly lowered, his unseeing gaze fixed on a remote scroll in the pattern of the carpet; then he said in a low tone: "I can only repeat again what I have said before—that I understand why you did what you did."

"Thank you," she answered, in the same tone.

There was another pause, for she could not trust herself to go on speaking; and presently he asked, with a tinge of bitterness in his voice: "That does not satisfy you?"

She hesitated. "It satisfies me as much as it does you—and no more," she replied at length.

He looked up hastily. "What do you mean?"

"Just what I say. We can neither of us go on living on that understanding just at present." She rose as she spoke, and crossed over to the hearth. "I want to go back to my nursing—to go out to Michigan, to a town where I spent a few months the year before I first came to Hanaford. I have friends there, and can get work easily. And you can tell people that I was ill and needed a change."

It had been easier to say than she had imagined, and her voice held its clear note till the end; but when she had ceased, the whole room began to reverberate with her words, and through the clashing they made in her brain she felt a sudden uncontrollable longing that they should provoke in him a cry of protest, of resistance. Oh, if he refused to let her go—if he caught her to him, and defied the world to part them—what then of her pledge to Mr. Langhope, what then of her resolve to pay the penalty alone?

But in the space of a heart-beat she knew that peril—that longed-for peril!—was past. Her husband had remained silent—he neither moved toward her nor looked at her; and she felt in every slackening nerve that in the end he would let her go.