“Why do you think that, Edmonia? Surely I have not—”
“Oh, yes you have—if you mean that you haven’t deserved to be thought ill of. You have wanted to run away from your duty and your happiness, and it was that sort of thing you had in mind. Otherwise you wouldn’t have needed to plan at all. Besides, you said you didn’t want to have this conversation with me, or to hear about Dorothy till you should be ‘free to act.’ You meant by that ‘free to run away.’ That is why I wrote you about Dorothy.”
“Listen, Edmonia!” said the young man pleadingly. “Don’t think of me as a coward or a shirk! Don’t imagine that I have been altogether selfish even in my thoughts! I did plan to run away, as you call it. But it was not to escape duty—for I didn’t know, then, that I had a duty to do. Or rather I thought that my duty called upon me to ‘run away.’ Will you let me tell you just what I felt and thought, and what the plan was that I had in mind?”
“Surely, Arthur. I did not really think you selfish, and certainly I did not think you cowardly. If I had, I should have taken pains to save Dorothy from you. But tell me the whole story.”
“I will. When we began our conversation in Dorothy’s little porch, I was just beginning to be afraid that I might learn to love her. She had so suddenly matured, somehow. Her womanhood seemed to have come upon her as the sunrise does in the tropics without any premonitory twilight. It was the coming of serious duty upon her, I suppose that wrought the change. At any rate, with the outbreak of the fever, she seemed to take on a new character. Without losing her childlike trustfulness and simplicity, she suddenly became a woman, strong to do and to endure. And her beauty came too, so that I caught myself thinking of her when I ought to have been thinking of something else.”
“Oh, yes,” Edmonia broke in. “I know all that and sympathize with it. You remember I found it all out before you did.”
“Yes, I was coming to that. Perhaps I wandered from my story a bit—”
“You did, of course. But under the circumstances I forgive you. Go on.”
“Well, when you told me it was too late for me to save myself from loving Dorothy, I knew you were right, though I had not suspected it before. I hoped, however, that it might not be too late to save Dorothy from myself. I did not want to lure her to a life that was sure to bring much of trial and hard work and sympathetic suffering to her.”
“But why not? Isn’t such a life, with the man she loves, very greatly the happiest one she could lead? Have you studied her character to so little purpose as to imagine—”