"Stop!" she cried, almost in a voice of terror. "I've not given you permission to speak to me, thus—to call me by name—"
"Then turn round and say you will be human once more! That you will talk and walk and ride again! If you don't, I'll begin all over again by telling you that you are the sweetest—"
"Hush!" she said softly, turning round abruptly with a gesture of protest, looking up into his face, and then down at the ground to conceal her confusion. "I think we understand one another," she said at length, and raising her eyes to his again, she held out both her hands which he seized and held in his own.
"Let us be friends again," she continued, gently withdrawing her hands from his.
"No, don't say that!" he interrupted. "We can't be that! Let it rest as it is!"
XXIV
"When you love, you love," runs a gypsy proverb.
Bessie wore the despairing look of one who clings to a last vain hope. How had it happened? Why had everything gone contrary to her expectations? Why was Mr. Yankton dragging her at the wheels of his chariot instead of she him? According to her social standards he had seen but little, and yet he had the savoir faire of a man of the world. Her preconceived ideas on certain subjects were so upset that she no longer appeared to have a hold on anything; the very ground seemed to be slipping away beneath her.
Strange that one could care for the person whom one least expected to, that the most humiliating moment in one's life might be the happiest as well. If any one had suggested such a possibility to her six months previously, she would have laughed at the mere thought. How could she relinquish the life she knew for his? She fought against his influence with all her powers of resistance. And yet, what woman in her right mind would hesitate to follow the man of her choice to the sunlit valleys of our dreams? Weaker women than she had done so and been happy, while stronger ones had hesitated, as was the case with Blanch, and lived to regret it. She secretly prayed that she might be spared the torture which Blanch was suffering and the despair which must inevitably overtake her should she fail to win back the man she had let slip from her; for what, after all, could life be to one without the true comradeship of love? She began to feel and realize the ineffable sweetness of life's fullness as the days of her awakening continued, while the ache at her heart told her plainly enough that the decisive moment of her life had arrived—that she must choose between happiness and ambition. The one, rich and full though accompanied perhaps by pain and even denial at times; the other fraught with uncertainty.
She understood now the meaning of Chiquita's passionate longing for the man she loved; a thing which the worldliness of the life she had lived hitherto had taught her to be too extravagant to exist anywhere outside of books, but which was true nevertheless. Her intuition told her this in the face of all the world might say to the contrary. As she looked back over the years and thought of her friends, she realized that she like them had submerged her life in the superficial pleasures of the world; but had they filled her cup of happiness? Until now she had not felt the lack of life's crowning joy, for the reason that youth is buoyant and full of hope, and the grand passion had not yet entered into her life. These and a thousand other thoughts ran through her mind that night as she recalled Dick's words.