I could not at first understand this, but after a while I began to see that we two had reached the point beyond which it was impossible to go without encountering the most tremendous fact of our lives—my marriage and all that was involved by it.
During dinner we spoke very little. He seemed intentionally not to look at me. The warm glances of his sea-blue eyes, which all the afternoon had been making the colour mount to my cheeks, had gone, and it sent a cold chill to my heart to look across the table at his clouded face. But sometimes when he thought my own face was down I was conscious that his eyes were fixed on me with a questioning, almost an imploring gaze. His nervousness communicated itself to me. It was almost as if we had begun to be afraid of each other and were hovering on the brink of fatal revelations.
When dinner was over, the table cleared and the servants gone, I could bear the strain no longer, so making excuse of a letter I had to write to the Reverend Mother I sat down at my desk, whereupon Martin lit a cigar and said he would stroll over the headland.
I heard his footsteps going down the stone stairway from the balcony; I heard their soft thud on the grass of the lawn; I heard their sharper crackle on the gravel of the white path, and then they mingled with the surge and wash of the flowing tide and died away in the distance.
I rose from the desk, and going over to the balcony door looked out into the darkness. It was a beautiful, pathetic, heart-breaking night. No moon, but a perfect canopy of stars in a deep blue sky. The fragrance of unseen flowers—sweetbriar and rose as well as ripening fruit—came up from the garden. There was no wind either, not even the rustle of a leaf, and the last bird of evening was silent. All the great orchestra of nature was still, save for the light churning of the water running in the glen and the deep organ song of the everlasting sea.
"What can I do?" I asked myself.
Now that Martin was gone I had begun to understand him. His silence had betrayed his heart to me even more than his speech could have done. Towering above him like a frowning mountain was the fact that I was a married woman and he was trying to stand erect in his honour as a man.
"He must be suffering too," I told myself.
That was a new thought to me and it cut me to the quick.
When it came to me first I wanted to run after him and throw myself into his arms, and then I wanted to run away from him altogether.