At the softness of his tone her eyes had filled slowly with tears.
“I mustn’t! Oh, I mustn’t! The happiness would turn into a curse. You mustn’t ask me!”
Daunt struggled between a rising pity for her suffering and a helpless frenzy of irritation. Between the two he felt himself choking. There seemed in her a resistance and an implacable hostility that he was as powerless to combat as to understand. He began to comprehend the terrible strength that lies in consistent weakness. There was something far worse in her silent mood than there could have been in a storm of reproaches or of vehement denial. He felt that if he spoke again he could but raise higher the barrier between them, which would not be beaten down by sheer force. He mounted, stumblingly and blindly, his left hand awkwardly swinging, and, turning his horse’s head, spurred him into a vicious trot.
A bit of golden-rod had dropped from his button-hole when he had crushed her in his embrace, and as he disappeared down the curved road, under the passionate foliage, Margaret slipped upon her knees and caught the dusty blossom to her face in agonized abandon. Tears came to her in a gusty whirl of longing, and strangling sobs tore at her throat.
VII.
Nightshade and wistaria. The lusty poison-vine and the delicate climbing tendrils. The evil and the pure. Their snake-like stems wound about each other, twining in sinuous intimacy, the cardinal berries flaunting alone where the fragrant purple blooms had long since fallen. They clung to each other, the enmeshed and alien branches veiling a sightless trunk, whose rotted limbs, barkless and neglected, projected bare knobs complainingly from the vagrant tangle. It drew Margaret’s steps, and she went closer. The dogs that had followed yelping at her heels, after she had tired of throwing sticks for them to fetch, now went nosing off across the orchard in canine unsympathy with her reflective mood. She stood a monochrome, in roughish brown tweed, under the dappling shadows.
“Miss Langdon, I believe?”
The deep, resonant voice recalled her. She saw a smooth-shaven face with the rounded outline that belongs to youth, and is but rarely the heritage of age, surmounted by the striking incongruity of perfectly milk-white hair. His lips were thin and firm, suggesting at one time strength and firmness, and the glance which met her from the frank, hazel eyes was one of open friendliness. His clerical coat was close-buttoned to his vigorous chin.