“Do you know,” she said, breaking the pause with a little nervous laugh, “that if you are to preserve the good will of your neighbours, you must stay away from me?”
“Then do I this minute forswear their friendship, for to stay from you would be to remain outside of Paradise. Only tell me one thing,—you did not hate me for the news I wrote you of Barry?”
“Nay, it was the one of your letters I felt drawn to answer.”
He took her unresisting hand and kissed it softly. “If you loved him, I would I had died in his place.”
And then again that silence fell between them, while at his heart was biting that most helpless of all jealousy—the jealousy of the dead. Against a living rival one may contend with hope; but when that on which the heart is set has come to be but a memory, incapable of blunder or cruelty, the contest becomes useless, or pitifully unequal. Yearningly Richard’s eyes studied the face before him, and yet he would not ask her the question that burned in his heart. Some day she would tell him the truth of her own accord; until then he must wait and suffer.
His return, she foresaw, was to be to her at once a relief and an embarrassment, for she would not consent to his making public her share in his escape of the winter, lest it look like a plea on her part for a cessation of hostilities.
“I have held my own against them all these years; I will not ask for any terms, now that the end has come, and my side has gone down in defeat,” she said.
“But, Joscelyn, think how they would adore you for such a service to their country! My information was most useful to General Greene.”
“I did it not for sake of their country.”
“Well, then, for sake of their countryman. They love me, if you do not.” He leaned toward her laughing, yet pleading; and she noted how honest and pleasant were his eyes. But she held to her point against all of his arguments; and so he was feign to yield except in regard to his mother; there he was firm.