Hagar had a physical strength for which he was unprepared. Exerting it, she freed herself, and in the same instant and as deliberately as swiftly, struck him across the face with her open hand. "Good-bye, to you!" she said in a thrilling voice.
They stared at each other for a moment across space. Then Hagar said quietly. "You had better go, Ralph...."
He went. When the door had closed behind him, she stood very still for a few moments, her eyes upon the pine bough. The excess of colour slowly ebbed from her face, the anger died in her eyes. "Oh, all of us poor, struggling souls!" she said. Obeying some inner impulse she first lowered, then extinguished the lights in the room and moved to one of the windows. She threw up the sash and the keen, autumnal night streamed in upon her. The window-seat was low and broad. She sat there with her head thrown back against the frame, and let the night and the high, starry heaven and the moving air absorb and lift her. It was very clear and there seemed depths on depths above. Hyades and Pleiades, and the Charioteer, and Andromeda Bound, and Perseus climbing the steep sky. "We are all bound and limited—we are all on the lower slopes of Time—down in the fens with the lower nature. It is only a question of more or less—Aspiration born and strengthening, or Aspiration yet in the womb. Then what room for anger because another is where I have been—because another, coming upward, rests awhile in the dungeon that was also mine, perhaps it was yesterday, perhaps it was ages ago?... Where I am to-day will seem dungeon enough to that which one day I shall be.... And so with him, and so with us all...."
A month after this she found among her letters one morning four smoothly ecstatic pages from Sylvie Carter. Ralph had asked Sylvie to marry him, and Sylvie had said Yes. Sylvie wrote that she expected to be very happy, and that she was going to do her best to make Ralph so, too. The next day brought a half-page from Ralph. It stated that something Hagar had said had set him to thinking. She had said that there was being a line drawn and that some men and some women were finding themselves together on either side. He thought there was truth in it, and that, after all, one should marry within one's class; otherwise a perpetual clash of opinions, fatal to love. There followed a terse announcement of his engagement to Sylvie, and he signed himself, "Your affectionate cousin, Ralph Coltsworth."
But it was Old Miss whose letter was wholly aggrieved and indignant....
CHAPTER XXXIII
GILEAD BALM
The second letter from Old Miss came in February. The Colonel had suddenly failed and taken to his bed. Old Miss believed that he would get up again,—there was, she said, no reason why he shouldn't,—but in the mean time there he lay. He was a little wandering in his mind, and he had taken to thinking that Hagar was in the house, and a little girl still, and demanding to see her. Old Miss suggested that she should come to Gilead Balm.