For some reason I have always dated the beginning of this change to that morning when Julianna went off to ride alone. Yet, if I wanted to be sure of bringing back to her face an old trace of her mischievous smile, it was only necessary for me to question her about the cause of her accident.
“I have promised the horse never to tell,” she would say, putting her finger to her red lips. And I have never been able to decide whether she was concealing, playfully, some little folly or awkwardness of her own, or, behind her light manner, some more serious experience.
In any case, it was plain that some accursed thing had come between us. I found after some months that I must face this as a fact. We said little to each other from morning till night. When evening had come I did not go home, as I always had, with a little thrill of the old expectation which had never seemed to wear out. Instead I had a subconscious reluctance to enter a relation in which each day sympathy and understanding grew less and less. I began to suffer from a desire to demand from her a complete disclosure of all that had been hidden from me, and this temptation to break my solemn promise grew when, asking her on several occasions as to where she had been at this or that hour, I found that she was evading my questions.
At last it became evident enough that I had not been deceived in my increasing suspicions that something was wrong. One evening she burst into tears as she stood before my chair, and then falling on her knees, caught up my hands in her own and pressed them to her neck, cheeks, and forehead.
“Whatever happens, you will love me?” she cried out desperately. “Say you will! Say you will!”
“You know that,” I said.
Perhaps I had answered as badly as I could, for it seemed to cause her the greatest pain.
“I wish you had not said so,” she exclaimed, with a wild look in her eyes. “It is your goodness that hurts. Don’t you see what comfort it must be to a woman to have her husband cruel to her—beat her—abuse her!”
I drew back from my wife, astounded.
“Stop!” I said, with the first show of stern authority I had ever made since I had known her. “It’s time for you who dare to speak like that—to tell—”