“I shall have to leave you here,” she said.
“Then yeh won’t hev me, ay? Yeh better think twice ’fore yeh say nao! Yeh won’t git another sich a chance—to live like a lady, ’n’ hev ev’rything yeh want. ’N’ ef yeh dew say nao, yeh kin rest ’sured yeh ain’t heerd th’ last of it, ner him nuther.” Milton’s little green-gray eyes watched her face intently, and he fingered his flaring plated watch-chain with nervous preoccupation. “What d’yeh say, yes’ ’r nao?”
“I can’t say anything more than I have said—now,” she answered, and, stepping over the stile, left him.
For a long time afterward Annie’s conscience debated the justification of that final word, the last one she ever addressed to Milton, and which was obviously intended to keep alive a hope that she knew to be absurdly without ground or reason. Sometimes even now she has momentary doubts about it—but she silences cavil by whispering to herself in unanswerable defence: “I thought then that possibly it might be needed to help Seth—perhaps even to save him.”
She had little leisure just then, however, to devote to moral introspection, for Samantha met her, half-way down the thorn-walk, to excitedly tell her that her grandmother, Mrs. Warren, was very much worse than usual.
CHAPTER XXXII.—“A WICKED WOMAN!”
When Isabel looked into her mirror next morning, the image shown back fairly startled her. Day by day during this eventful week the glass had helped her to grow familiar with reddened eyes, with harsh, ageing lines, and with a pallor which no devices of the toilet could efface. It was not so much an added accentuation of these which riveted her gaze, now, upon the mirror, as the suggestion of a new face—of a stranger’s countenance, reflecting meanings and thoughts of the uncommon kind.
She studied the face at first with an almost impersonal interest; then as the brain associated these lineaments with her own, and made their expression a part of her own spiritual state, she said to this other self in the glass, audibly: