Enoch proposed, as Esther expected, with an air of bestowing himself where he was sure to be appreciated. She took some time about it and then accepted him.
Aaron was apparently the only person in New Damascus who had not foreseen it. He was deeply astonished. Why? It was not an improbable consummation. Yet it seemed to him strange and unnatural.
He first heard of it at dinner with the Mitchells. Enoch was present. Mitchell announced it as if Aaron were a large party of friends. He responded as such. There was a false note in his felicitations. He was aware of it; so was Esther. But in trying to cancel the impression he made it worse. Enoch was protected as by wool with a sense of proprietorship and self-satisfaction. Mitchell was insensitive.
Esther kept looking at Aaron. There was a troubled, startled expression in her eyes. He misread it for distaste. He had long imagined she disliked him. Several times that evening she was brief with him, almost curt, and this had never happened before.
His visits to the Mitchell house thereafter were formal and less frequent. Enoch’s manner of making himself paramount affected him disagreeably. And Esther’s behaviour perplexed him. She was at one time much more friendly than he expected and at another so deliberately indifferent that he could only conclude that she meant to estrange him.
Yet now a fatality began to operate. By a law of coincidence that we do not understand, and may not exist, they began to meet outside the household, purely, as it seemed in each case, by accident,—in unexpected places, on the street again and again, once at night in a crowd at an open air Punch and Judy show in which neither of them was at all interested, once in Philadelphia where he was transacting business and she was shopping with her maid, and once in a memorable way on a path through the woods to Throne Rock, a natural seat on the mountain summit from which the view of the valley was exciting.
It was a Sunday afternoon in early May. He was going; she was returning. They were at first surprised, then embarrassed, and became absurdly self-conscious. She wore a wide-brim hat, pulled down on both sides and tied under her chin. She was hot and tired; her color was high. Her dress was torn. He noticed it.
“I was after these,” she said, catching his glance. She held out a bunch of dogwood blossoms, with a gesture to share them. He admired them and there was nothing else to say. So they stood, she looking at him and holding out the dogwood flowers, he looking fixedly at them, until her arm dropped and she turned to go on. He let her go and went his way up the path. But he looked back. She had stopped and was seated on a fallen tree trunk. He returned. She did not look up.
“I’d like to give you a farewell party,” he said. “Will you come?”
“A farewell party?”