“No, it’s not wrong! We’ll get you free. He—I’ll say it now, Diane—he had no right to marry you!”
“I was the one who did wrong—as much as he did,” she managed to say. “I—I thought I loved him; I told him I loved him. I must have. If I didn’t, I—I could never have married him!”
“But you were mistaken! That’s common; it happens often. You were mistaken—you didn’t love him!”
She stopped again, and the misty sunlight illumined her face until it appeared to him to have a purity as luminous and fragile as an alabaster lamp. Her spirit, tried beyond endurance, seemed to be shining through it, darkening her eyes and softening her lips.
“Oh, I’m not sure!” she cried. “Don’t you see how I feel? There are two roads, and I stand at the crossing. I’m bewildered; I can’t see; I can only feel——”
“But I know!” he returned with profound emotion. “I know! My love is strong enough to find the way for us both. It’s not wrong to love you, for you’ve given him up!”
For a moment, as she clung to him, he felt the slight weight of her body against him, the fragrance of her hair upon his cheek. Then she had slipped out of his arms and left him alone in the mist.
XXXII
In a tumult of feeling deeper and more complex than ever, Diane made her way through a meadow that furnished a short cut to her own door. She was vaguely aware that the grass was long, and that she was getting drenched nearly to her knees, when she saw, in a half-conscious way, a cluster of asters blooming happily just at the spot where a lowered fence-rail made it possible for her to scramble into the end of her father’s garden.
She was scarcely conscious of what she did, and she had a new feeling of guilt. Until now she had felt that she was as supremely in the right as Faunce was supremely in the wrong; but the whole attitude of her mind was breaking down. She felt a tremor of fear, though even at that moment she could not have told what it was she feared.