“By what happened I have come to see what matters in life. I was behind the hedge. I have broken through upon the road. I know my goal now. The highway is before me.”
She felt the tragedy in his words, and her voice shook as she spoke. “I wish I knew life better. Then I could make a better answer. You are on the road, you say. But I feel that it is a hard and cruel road—oh, I understand that at least! Tell me, please, tell me the whole truth. You are hiding from me what you feel. I have upset your life, have I not? You are a Quaker, and Quakers are better than all other Christian people, are they not? Their faith is peace, and for me, you—” She covered her face with her hands for an instant, but turned quickly and looked him in the eyes: “For me you put your hand upon the clock of a man’s life, and stopped it.”
She got to her feet with a passionate gesture, but he put a hand gently upon her arm, and she sank back again. “Oh, it was not you; it was I who did it!” she said. “You did what any man of honour would have done, what a brother would have done.”
“What I did is a matter for myself only,” he responded quickly. “Had I never seen your face again it would have been the same. You were the occasion; the thing I did had only one source, my own heart and mind. There might have been another way; but for that way, or for the way I did take, you could not be responsible.”
“How generous you are!” Her eyes swam with tears; she leaned over the table where he had been writing, and the tears dropped upon his letter. Presently she realised this, and drew back, then made as though to dry the tears from the paper with her handkerchief. As she did so the words that he had written met her eye: “‘But offences must come, and woe to him from whom the offence cometh!’ I have begun now, and only now, to feel the storms that shake us to our farthest cells of life.”
She became very still. He touched her arm and said heavily: “Come away, come away.”
She pointed to the words she had read. “I could not help but see, and now I know what this must mean to you.”
“Thee must go at once,” he urged. “Thee should not have come. Thee was safe—none knew. A few hours and it would all have been far behind. We might never have met again.”
Suddenly she gave a low, hysterical laugh. “You think you hide the real thing from me. I know I’m ignorant and selfish and feeble-minded, but I can see farther than you think. You want to tell the truth about—about it, because you are honest and hate hiding things, because you want to be punished, and so pay the price. Oh, I can understand! If it were not for me you would not....” With a sudden wild impulse she got to her feet. “And you shall not,” she cried. “I will not have it.” Colour came rushing to her cheeks.
“I will not have it. I will not put myself so much in your debt. I will not demand so much of you. I will face it all. I will stand alone.”