She could not trust herself to say more, but hurried off to her room, leaving the Reverend Arthur gazing fixedly at the red-brick floor.
“We are too old,” he muttered softly, from time to time; and as he said those words there seemed to stand before him the tall, well-developed figure of a dark-eyed, beauteous woman, who was gazing at him softly from between her half-closed, heavily-fringed lids.
“We are too old,” he said again; and then he went on dreaming of that day’s drive, and Helen’s gentle farewell—of the walks they had had in his garden—the flowers she had taken from his hand. Lastly, of his sister’s words respecting disturbing influences, and then settling down to their own happy humdrum life once again.
“It is fate!” he said, at last—“fate. Can we bring back the past?”
He felt that he could not, even as his sister felt just then, as she knelt beside one of the chairs in her own sweet-scented room, and asked for strength, as she termed it, to fight against this temptation.
“No,” she cried, at last; “I cannot—I will not! For Arthur’s sake I will be firm.”