And suddenly turning from him to the back of the sofa, hiding her face in her hands, she broke into passionate crying.
He stood for a moment, taut, controlled, as though he was fighting his last little desperate battle. Then he was beaten. He knelt down on the floor beside the sofa. He touched her hair, then her cheek. She made a little movement towards him. He put his arms around her.
"Don't cry. Don't cry. I can't bear that. You mustn't say that you've taken anything from me. It isn't true. You've given me everything... everything. Why should we struggle any longer? Why shouldn't we take what has been given to us? Your husband doesn't care. I haven't anybody. Has God given me so much that I should miss this? And has He put it in our hearts if He didn't mean us to take it? I love you. I've loved you since first I set eyes on you. I can't keep away from you any longer. It's keeping away from myself. We're one. We are one another--not alone, either of us--any more...."
She turned towards him. He drew her closer and closer to him. With a little sigh of happiness and comfort she yielded to him.
There was only one cloud in the dim green sky, a cloud orange and crimson, shaped like a ship. As the sun was setting, a little wind stirred, the faint aftermath of the storm of the day, and the cloud, now all crimson, passed over the town and died in fading ribbons of gold and orange in the white sky of the far horizon.
Only Miss Milton, perhaps, among all the citizens of the town, waiting patiently behind her open window, watched its career.
Chapter IX
The Quarrel
Every one has known, at one time or another in life, that strange unexpected calm that always falls like sudden snow on a storm-tossed country, after some great crisis or upheaval. The blow has seemed so catastrophic that the world must be changed with the force of its fall-- but the world is not changed; hours pass and days go by, and no one seems to be aware that anything has occurred...it is only when months have gone, and perhaps years, that one looks back and sees that it was, after all, on such and such a day that life was altered, values shifted, the face of the world turned to a new angle.