"What was it?"
"The mill-door and you in your old blue gown. And for seven days I've stopped seeing that. I haven't it to steer by. Will you chance it?"
"Must you be playing with meanings even in dreams? Don't you know—don't you know that for a woman who loves, and is not sure that she is loved, her days and nights are all chances, every minute she lives is a chance? It might be...it might not be...oh, those ghosts of joy and pain! they are almost too much to bear. For the joy isn't pure joy, or the pain pure pain, and she cannot come to rest in either of them. Sometimes the joy is nearly as great as though she knew; yet at the instant she tries to take it, it looks at her with the eyes of doubt, and she trembles, and dare not take it yet. And sometimes the pain is all but the death she foresees; yet even as she submits to it, it lays upon her heart the finger of hope. And then she trembles again, because she need not take it yet. Those are her chances, Peter. But when she knows that her beloved is her lover, life may do what it will with her; but she is beyond its chances for ever."
"Your corn! you kept my corn!"
"Till it should bear. And your shell there—you've kept my shell."
"Till it should speak. And now—oh, see these things that have held our dreams for twenty years! The life is threshed from them for ever—they are only husks. They can hold our dreams no more. Oh, I can't go on dreaming by myself, I can't, it's no use. I thought my heart had learned to bear its dream alone, but the time comes when love in its beauty is too near to pain. There is more love than the single heart can bear. Good-by, my boy—good-by!"
"Helen! don't suffer so! oh, child, what are you doing?—"
"Letting my dear dreams go...it's no use, Peter..."
The millstones took them and crushed them.
She uttered a sharp cry....