She left the window with silent speed, saying, in her heart, "You needn't! You shan't!"
As March with clouded brow was lifting his hand toward a tortuous brass knocker the door opened and Barbara, carrying a book and pencil in one hand, while the other held down her hat-brim, tripped across the doorstep.
The cloud vanished. "Miss Barb—good-morning!"
"O!—Mr.—March." Her manner so lacked both surprise and pleasure that he colored. He had counted on a sweet Southern handshake, but she kept hold of the hat-brim, let her dry smile of inquiry fade into a formal deference, and took comfort in his disconcertion.
"I was just coming," he said, "I—thought you'd let me come back just to say good-by—but I see you're on your way to a recitation—I—"
Her smile was cruel. "Why, my recitations are not so serious as that," she drawled. "Just to say good-by ought not to con-sti-tute any se-ri-ous de-ten-tion."
John's heart sank like a stone. Scarcely could he believe his senses. Yet this was she; that new queen of his ambitions whose heavenly friendship had lifted first love—boy love—from its grave and clad it in the shining white of humility and abnegation to worship her sweet dignity, purity, and tenderness, asking for nothing, not even for hope, in return. This was she who at every new encounter had opened to him a higher revelation of woman's worth and loveliness than the world had ever shown him; she to whom he had been writing letters half last night and all this morning, tearing each to bits before he had finished it because he could see no life ahead which an unselfish love could ask her to live, and as he rent the result of each fresh effort hearing the voice of his father saying to him as in childhood days, "I'd be proud faw you to have the kitt'n, son, but, you know, she wouldn't suit yo' dear motheh's high-strung natu'e. You couldn't ever be happy with anything that was a constant tawment to her, could you?"
These thoughts filled but a moment, and before the lovely presence confronting him could fully note the depth of his quick distress a wave of self-condemnation brought what seemed to him the answer of the riddle: that this was rightly she, the same angelic incarnation of wisdom and rectitude, as of gentleness and beauty, to whom in yesterday's sunset hour of surprise and ecstatic yearning he had implied things so contrary to their "perfect understanding," and who now, not for herself selfishly, but in the name and defence of all blameless womanhood, was punishing him for his wild presumption. O but if she would only accuse him—here—this instant, so that contrition might try its value! But under the shade of her hat her eyes merely waited with a beautiful sort of patient urgency for his parting word. The moment's silence seemed an hour, but no word did he find. One after another almost came, but failed, and at last, just as he took in his breath to say he knew not what—anything so it were something—he saw her smile melt with sudden kindness, while her lips parted for speech, and to his immeasurable confusion and terror heard himself ask her with cheerful cordiality, "Won't you walk in?"
It would have been hard to tell which of the two turned the redder.
"Why, Mr. March, you in-ti-ma-ted that you had no ti-i-ime!"