"What is it gives you such thoughts, Neelie?" said her sister, in a tone which, had it not been charged with so ranch depth of feeling, would have been plaintive. Her gray, profound eyes, from a slight slanting upward of the brows above them, took on an expression in harmony with her tone. "I never knew you to have such, until lately."
"I suppose, until lately, I didn't have any thoughts at all." There was a pause. Sophie looked away over the beautiful valley, but it could not drive the shadow of anxious and loving sorrow from her face. Cornelia busied herself selecting leaves from her basket, and arranging them in a bouquet. Like them, she was more vividly and variously beautiful since the frost.
"Do you think men's ideas of love, and such things, are as high as women's?" asked she presently.
"Why shouldn't they be?" answered Sophie, coming back from her reverie with a sigh. "I'm sure Bressant's are: if they weren't—"
She sank again into thought, and another long silence followed. This time Cornelia's hands were still, but she watched Sophie closely.
"Well—suppose they weren't—suppose he were to turn out not quite so high-minded, and all that, as you think him: you would stop loving him, wouldn't you?"
"Why do you suggest it!" cried Sophie, almost with a sob. She bent down, resting her face upon her arms, and against the rock. "That question has come to me once before. How can I know? If he were to degenerate now—now, after I have told him that I love him—it must be because he no longer loved me; and I should have no right to love him, then."
Cornelia looked down, for there was a certain light in her eyes which had no right to be there. When she thought it was subdued, she raised them again.
"Shouldn't you hate him always afterward? Shouldn't you want to kill him?" demanded she, in a low voice.
"I should want to kill only the memory of his unworthiness," replied Sophie, her voice rising and clearing, while she regarded her sister with a full, bright glance. "As to hating him—I cannot hate any one I have loved, Neelie." She raised herself up as she spoke, and sat erect.