Adela broke into moaning. "Why do you ask me that?" she exclaimed. "Oh, don't you know how hard it is to go back? Do you think it can ever be the same? I don't want that kind of life any more: I am for something different now. You see, all this studying and thinking and reading has given me a new idea, and there's no one to take a share in it. When I go back and marry Dennie that part of me will be alone. What am I to do; oh, what am I to do?"
Her distress was so acute that she gave way to tears, which she helplessly tried to press back with a hand at her eyes.
"Don't cry, Deely," said Sylv, taking her other hand. "You're tired out, and you're troubling yourself, but you don't need to. By and by you'll be happy; never fear!"
Adela clung to his hand instinctively. "You're a kind fellow, Sylv," said she, ceasing to sob. "I know you wish me well. But it's all over with me. I ought not to think of anything but Dennie. If I can make him happy, why—I ought—to be satisfied." But the stifled tone in which she uttered the words showed how far she fell short of that duty.
Sylv longed to speak more tenderly to her. The touch of her trusting hand in his was maddening. He would have laid down his life, at that instant, to comfort her; and if he was ready to sacrifice his own, what mattered the life and happiness of any other? But there was only one way in which he felt sure that he could secure lasting comfort to her, so far as one man might; and that way he dared not propose. Why had he not foreseen this difficulty and this peril in time to evade them? He had imagined that his whole life depended on books, and here he found that it was nothing as compared with a woman. He had indulged in the tranquil belief that he was a disinterested student; but now he awoke to the fact that he was a reckless lover!
"Deely," he exclaimed, rising, but still keeping her hand in his, "if you don't love Dennie enough to go back to him, you must not do it!"
"And break his heart?" she asked, looking up at him with an effort at reproach.
"I speak to you as his brother," answered Sylv—"his brother, whom he sent here of his own accord to watch over you; and I say that it would be wrong. You would not be happy yourself, and you would find it impossible to make him happy."
Adela drew her hand away. "But I have promised him! And I will keep my promise."
As she spoke she rose erect: he could hear her close her teeth with a grating sound.