But she could not say the word. She turned her face away and sat silent.
He waited with absolute patience for minutes. Then at last very gently he took his arms away from her and stood up.
"I am going back to the inn," he said. "And I shall wait there till to-morrow morning for your answer. If you send me away, I shall go without seeing you again. But if—if you decide otherwise,"—he lowered his voice as if he could not wholly trust it—"then I shall apply at once for leave to resign. And—Daisy—we will go to the New World together, and make up there for all the happiness we have missed in the Old."
He ended almost under his breath, and she seemed to hear his heart beat through the words. It was almost too much for her even then. But she held herself back, for there was that in her woman's soul that clamoured to be heard—the patter of tiny feet that had never ceased to echo there, the high chirrup of a baby's voice, the vision of a toddling child with eager arms outstretched.
And so she held her peace and let him go, though the struggle within her left her physically weak and cold, and she did not dare to raise her eyes lest he should surprise the love-light in them once again.
It had come to this at last then—the final dividing of the ways, the definite choice between good and evil. And she knew in her heart what that choice would be, knew it even as the sound of the closing door reached her consciousness, knew it as she strained her ears to catch the fall of his feet upon the flagged path, knew it in every nerve and fibre of her being as she sprang to the window for a last glimpse of the man who had loved her all her life long, and now at last had won her for himself.
Slowly she turned round once more to the writing-table. The unopened letter caught her eye. She picked it up with a set face, looked at it closely for a few moments, and then deliberately tore it into tiny fragments.
A little later she went to her own room. From a lavender-scented drawer she took an envelope, and shook its contents into her hand. Only a tiny unmounted photograph of a laughing baby, and a ringlet of baby hair!
Her face quivered as she looked at them. They had been her dearest treasures. Passionately she pressed them to her trembling lips, but she shed no tears. And when she returned to the sitting-room there was no faltering in her step.
She poked the fire into a blaze, and, kneeling, dropped her treasures into its midst. A moment's torture showed in her eyes, and passed.