Then the bell rang again, the engine throbbed, and Martin said, "Good-bye! Good-bye!"
While the train moved out of the station he stood bareheaded on the platform with such a woebegone face that looking back at him my throat began to hurt me as it used to do when I was a child.
I was very sad that day as we travelled north. My adopted country had become dear to me during my ten years' exile from home, and I thought I was seeing the last of my beautiful Italy, crowned with sunshine and decked with flowers.
But there was another cause of my sadness, and that was the thought of Martin's uneasiness about my marriage the feeling that if he had anything to say to my father he ought to have said it then.
And there was yet another cause of which I was quite unconscious—that like every other girl before love dawns on her, half of my nature was still asleep, the half that makes life lovely and the world dear.
To think that Martin Conrad was the one person who could have wakened my sleeping heart! That a word, a look, a smile from him that day could have changed the whole current of my life, and that. . . .
But no, I will not reproach him. Have I not known since the day on St. Mary's Rock that above all else he is a born gentleman?
And yet. . . . And yet. . . .