"How could it be otherwise?" she asked, indignantly. "The first evening of your arrival, when his name was mentioned, your face grew as black as night. When I again sought to speak to you of him, you adjured me never to mention his name. You taxed my forbearance severely at that time. But I hoped you would become so changed that such enmity would be impossible."
"I see it all now," he groaned—"the miserable fatality of it all. I must shut off the one way of escape, and then go forward. By my own act, I must destroy my one chance. If I had only known this in time. And yet it's through my own act that I did not know. Your God is certainly one of justice. I'm punished now for all the past. But it seems a trifle cruel to show one heaven and then shut the door in one's face. If I had only known!"
"There," exclaimed Annie, in the deepest distress; "because of this little thing you fall back into your old scepticism."
"This 'little thing' is death to me," he said, in a hard, bitter tone. "Oh no, I'm not at all sceptical. The 'argument from design,' the nature of the result, are both too clear. I'm simply being dealt with according to law. Though perfectly sincere, you were entirely too lenient that Sunday evening when I told you what I was. My conscience was right after all. I only wish that I had fallen from yonder roof the other night. I might then have made my exit decently."
"Mr. Gregory, you shock me," she said, almost sternly. "You have no right to insult my faith in a merciful God by such words, and your believing Him cruel and vindictive on this one bit of your experience is the sheerest egotism. It is the essence of selfishness to think everything wrong when one does not have one's own way."
He only bowed his answer, then stepped out to the point of the hill, and took a long, lingering look at the valley and his old home, sighed deeply, turned, and said to her, quietly, "Perhaps it is time for you to return to your father."
CHAPTER XXVIII
WHAT A LOVER COULD DO
Without a word they descended the hill. Gregory was very pale, and this, with a certain firmness about his mouth, was the only indication of feeling on his part. Otherwise, he was the same finished man of the world that he had appeared when he came. Annie's face grew more and more troubled with every glance at him.
"He is hardening into stone," she thought; and she was already reproaching herself for speaking so harshly. "I might have known," she thought, "that his rash, bitter words were only incoherent cries of pain and disappointment."