Then, suddenly, as a distressed child might have done, he bowed his head on his hands, and his body shook with sobs.
It was a beautiful head, of noble shape, with glossy, blue-black hair. Isabel's heart was torn as she gazed upon his grief. For an instant she forgot everything but his suffering.
"Don't take it this way," she begged, and there were tears now in her own eyes. "I never dreamed you cared really, and it distresses me to death."
Fult made no reply save to give her a long look; then he sat, head bowed in hands, body shaken with slow sobs, for some minutes. At last, lifting mournful eyes to hers, he asked, gently, hopelessly:—
"If you and me had met away off somewheres in some far and distant land, where there wasn't no Lethie or nothing to come between us, do you allow then you could maybe have loved me the same as I love you?"
Isabel replied, in a voice she tried to make calm: "Almost any girl would find it an easy thing to fall in love with you."
"Not 'almost any girl,' but you," he persisted, gently.
"I—I don't know about it," answered Isabel; "I never thought that far along. You see, there were things between us,—Lethie and other things besides,—and that was enough for me, as I told you the day of the funeral meeting. And it's not any use to discuss the matter now. We must be going back down the hill."
"Must be going back down the hill," Fult repeated, sadly. He rose to his feet.
"Good-bye," he said in a low voice, still gazing with deep sadness into her eyes.