“You are agitated, Mr. Burton,” said a low voice at his side. “Have you been seeing visions—in the water?”
He turned and looked in the face of Polly Lester.
“Not visions,” he managed to say, “but reflections.”
“Reflections should not disturb you, Raymond”—she used his first name as though she had been his mother—“but you are straining your nervous system to the breaking point. Here is a dry log—shall we sit down?”
She led him to the log and seated herself beside him. The sun was setting after the long midsummer day, and the smooth, muddy water took on a surface of quicksilver. Their faces looked back at them out of the stream, and up from the young man’s memory rushed a similar scene, staged at Crotton’s Crossing. And just as the thought struck home, by a trick of the waving water the faces blended into one!
“You wonder that I, who have known you a week, should follow you here, do you not?” she was saying. “I should have stayed behind, I should have let you learn my secret for yourself. It is woman’s lot to carry her secret in her heart, guarded as a precious thing, until the object of that secret pries it forth. But I am not a woman, as other women are. I defy traditions; I defy conventions. I claim the right God gave me to live my life as I will, where I will, how I will, with whom I will. When first I looked into you—when first your eyes met mine, I knew—what you knew. Why should we deceive ourselves? Why should we mock our own destinies?”
“You speak strangely,” said Burton. “I—I do not understand.”
“Why do you lie to me, Raymond?” she asked, still in that low voice, deep and vibrant, but without a suggestion of anger. “Why do you seek to conceal—that which we both know?”
“You are a strange woman. I do not understand you.”
“Oh, that is different. Of course you do not understand me. Nobody does. I am so different. Instead of pretending I don’t care for you, instead of pretending I don’t know that you care for me, I admit it all. I am frank. I am truthful. I am, as you say, a strange woman.”