The rose-red flush of her face answered him.
"And you love him?" he asked brutally, while he watched her breathlessly, watched and saw, at the sudden question and the thought it brought, the divine light stealing into her eyes; he had seen it before, and for him!
He strode close to her, passionate words of pleading on his lips, and he stepped on the delicate blossoms scattered at her feet.
She looked down at them, and his glance followed hers and then went back to her face; he read her thoughts. So he had crushed with blundering footsteps other blossoms more delicate.
He was silent. He stood aside to let her pass, and pass out of his life.
But he, wrestling with the passionate thoughts surging through him, strode up the mountain-side farther and deeper into the solemn woods, away from any man's track, alone, for his fight. He threw himself down on the carpet of last year's leaves, far up on the crest, and lived again her words. He had lost, and lost what he had come most to desire; but back of it, like a strong sweet song vibrating through him as the evening wind did in the tree-tops, were words she had used and his father had written, and his heart now repeated. They set themselves to one chorus "Free, free, free!" He could feel no bitterness, only a mighty attunement to the vital influences of the spring-tide world and a virile pulsing of might and ambition. He took out his father's letter and read it again. There were sentences in it he could never forget.
"I have blamed myself for much of what looked like your failures." "I should not have put so much wealth in the hands of a boy." "Fortune is fickle; I wished to secure yours while I had the chance, so that you might never know the poverty I had suffered."
He thought of the stalwart old man and how his heart must have been wrung before he could write with such humility.
"I sent you on your way—to ruin, I feared, for many a day." "When at last you pulled up and determined to take up your old studies far from every memory, I hoped much; now I hope everything."