She told him.
It was then he caught her hands.
"Lilly, marry me! Make it possible! Don't let the years lead you into a blind alley. You are bound inevitably to lose a child like Zoe—to life. That's why you are so unaccountably blue, Lilly; the writing is on the wall."
"No!" she cried, plunging past him, her hat in hand and her throat now a cave of the winds for her unreleased sobs. "The years have brought me, Zoe. She is my fulfillment. You can't frighten me—life cannot take her from me. I'm not afraid—only, I can't bear anything to-night, least of all from you—"
"Lilly, you're not—"
"Let me go! I'm all right—only tired—that's all.
Terribly—terribly—tired."
She was presently on her homeward way, walking swiftly, almost, it would seem, a little madly, through a May evening that hung as thinly as one thickness of a veil.
At Seventy-second Street she veered suddenly and rather unaccountably to Riverside Drive and down into a ledge of park that dips like a terrace to the Hudson River.
An asphalt walk led in festoons from high parky nooks that sheltered couples, down to the water-slapped edge of docks, where the tidey surf had a thick, inarticulate lisp, as if what it had to say might only be comprehended from the under side.
At one of the lowermost curves of the walk, the width of a brace of railroad tracks between, a coal dock jutted out into the river. Across these forbidden tracks, indeed, as if they did not exist, Lilly wandered.