Gold!—such wage as men flung to the painted harlots gibing at the corners of the streets!
The horror of the humiliation filled her with loathing of herself. Unless she had become shameful in his sight, she thought, he could not have cast this shame upon her.
She gathered herself slowly up, and stood and looked with blind, aching eyes at the splendor of the sunrise.
Her heart was breaking.
Her one brief dream of gladness was severed sharply, as with a sword, and killed forever.
She did not reason—all thought was stunned in her; but as a woman, who loves looking on the face she loves, will see sure death written there long ere any other can detect it, so she knew, by the fatal and unerring instinct of passion, that he was gone from her as utterly and as eternally as though his grave had closed on him.
She did not even in her own heart reproach him. Her love for him was too perfect to make rebuke against him possible to her. Had he not a right to go as he would, to do as he chose, to take her or leave her, as best might seem to him? Only he had no right to shame her with what he had deemed shame to himself; no right to insult what he had slain.
She gathered herself slowly up, and took his money in her hand, and went along the river-bank. Whither? She had no knowledge at first; but, as she moved against the white light and the cool currents of the morning air, her brain cleared a little. The purpose that had risen in her slowly matured and strengthened; without its sustenance she would have sunk down and perished, like a flower cut at the root.
Of all the world that lay beyond the pale of those golden and russet orchards and scarlet lakes of blowing poppies she had no more knowledge than the lizard at her feet.
Cities, he had often said, were as fiery furnaces that consumed all youth and innocence which touched them; for such as she to go to them was, he had often said, to cast a luscious and golden peach of the summer into the core of a wasps'-nest. Nevertheless, her mind was resolute to follow him,—to follow him unknown by him; so that, if his footsteps turned to brighter paths, her shadow might never fall across his ways; but so that, if need were, if failure still pursued him, and by failure came misery and death, she would be there beside him, to share those fatal gifts which none would dispute with her or grudge her.