“Annie,” he cried,—“Annie! I have been talking rot. Annie, now I know I love you! I cannot spare you. This must not be. I did not understand.”
The weight was horrible.
“Oh, stop, Annie!” he cried, with a breaking voice, and there were tears on his face.
She turned upon him suddenly, and his arms fell by his side. His expression changed at the sight of her pale face.
“You do not understand,” she said. “I have said good-bye.”
She looked at him; he was evidently greatly distressed, a little out of breath, and he had just stopped blubbering. His contemptible quality reached the pathetic. She came up close to him, and, taking his damp Byronic visage between her hands, she kissed him again and again. “Good-bye, little man that I loved,” she said; “and good-bye to this folly of love.”
Then, with something that may have been a laugh or a sob,—she herself, when she came to write it all in her novel, did not know which,—she turned and hurried away again, and went out of the path that Aubrey Vair must pursue, at the cross-roads.
Aubrey Vair stood, where she had kissed him, with a mind as inactive as his body, until her white dress had disappeared. Then he gave an involuntary sigh, a large exhaustive expiration, and so awoke himself, and began walking, pensively dragging his feet through the dead leaves, home. Emotions are terrible things.