And then, almost immediately, Michael telephoned. “I have just come down,” he said, and asked Olivia to come riding with him. “I must talk to you at once.”
She refused to ride, but consented to meet him half-way, at the pine thicket where Higgins had discovered the foxcubs. “I can’t leave just now,” she told him, “and I don’t think it’s best for you to come here at the moment.”
For some reason, perhaps vaguely because she thought he might use the knowledge as a weapon to break down her will, she said nothing of the elopement. For in the confusion of the day, beneath all the uproar of scenes, emotions and telephone-calls, she had been thinking, thinking, thinking, so that in the end the uproar had made little impression upon her. She had come to understand that John Pentland must have lived thus, year after year, moving always in a secret life of his own, and presently she had come to the conclusion that she must send Michael away once and for all.
As she moved across the meadow she noticed that the birches had begun to turn yellow and that in the low ground along the river the meadows were already painted gold and purple by masses of goldenrod and ironweed. With each step she seemed to grow weaker and weaker, and as she drew near the blue-black wall of pines she was seized by a violent trembling, as if the sense of his presence were able somehow to reach out and engulf her even before she saw him. She kept trying to think of the old man as he stood beside her at the hedge, but something stronger than her will made her see only Michael’s curly black head and blue eyes. She began even to pray ... she (Olivia) who never prayed because the piety of Aunt Cassie and Anson and the Apostle to the Genteel stood always in her way.
And then, looking up, she saw him standing half-hidden among the lower pines, watching her. She began to run toward him, in terror lest her knees should give way and let her fall before she reached the shelter of the trees.
In the darkness of the thicket where the sun seldom penetrated, he put his arms about her and kissed her in a way he had never done before, and the action only increased her terror. She said nothing; she only wept quietly; and at last, when she had gained control of herself, she struggled free and said, “Don’t, Michael ... please don’t ... please.”
They sat on a fallen log and, still holding her hand, he asked, “What is it? What has happened?”
“Nothing.... I’m just tired.”
“Are you willing to come away with me? Now?” And in a low, warm voice, he added, “I’ll never let you be tired again ... never.”
She did not answer him, because it seemed to her that what she had to tell him made all her actions in the past seem inexplicable and cheap. She was filled with shame, and tried to put off the moment when she must speak.