She fought so wildly that he yielded to a dim sense that she was in earnest. He relaxed his grip. With the instinct of a hunted thing, she took a dangerous leap for safety clean across the swollen Inn. Luckily she alighted on a broad boulder, or a sprained ankle would have been the least penalty for that desperate means of escape.
As she stood there, with tears streaming down her face and the crimson brand of angry terror on her brow, the dreadful knowledge that he had lost her smote Bower like a rush of cold air from a newly opened tomb. Between them brawled the tiny torrent. It offered no bar to an active man; but even in his panic of sudden perception he resisted the impulse that bade him follow.
“Helen,” he pleaded, stretching forth his hands in frenzied gesture, “why do you cast me off? I swear by all a man holds sacred that I mean no wrong. You are dear to me as life itself. Ah, Helen, say that I may hope! I do not even ask for your love. I shall win that by a lifetime of devotion.”
At last she found utterance. He had alarmed her greatly; but no woman can feel it an outrage that a man should avow his longing. And she pitied Bower with a great pity. Deep down in her heart was a suspicion that they might have been happy together had they met sooner. She would never have loved him,—she knew that now beyond cavil,—but if they were married she must have striven to make life pleasant for him, while she drifted down the smooth stream of existence free from either abiding joys or carking sorrows.
“I am more grieved than I can tell that this should have happened,” she said, striving hard to restrain the sob in her voice, though it gave her words the ring of genuine regret. “I little dreamed that you thought of me in that way, Mr. Bower. But I can never marry you—never, no matter what the circumstances! Surely you will help me to dispel the memory of a foolish moment. It has been trying to both of us. Let us pretend that it never was.”
Had she struck him with a whip he could not have flinched so visibly beneath the lash as from the patent honesty of her words. For a time he did not answer, and the sudden calm that came quick on the heels of frenzy had in it a weird peacefulness.
Neither could ever again forget the noisy rush of the stream, the glad singing of birds in a thicket overhanging the bank, the tinkle of the cow bells as the cattle began to climb to the pastures for a luxurious hour ere sundown. It was typical of their lives that they should be divided by the infant Inn, almost at its source, and that thenceforth the barrier should become ever wider and deeper till it reached the infinite sea.
He seemed to take his defeat well. He was pale, and his lips twitched with the effort to attain composure. He looked at Helen with a hungry longing that was slowly acknowledging restraint.
“I must have frightened you,” he said, breaking a silence that was growing irksome. “Of course I apologize for that. But we cannot leave things where they are. If you must send me away from you, I may at least demand a clear understanding. Have no fear that I shall distress you further. May I join you, or will you walk to the bridge a little higher up?”
“Let us return to the hotel,” she protested.