Let who will say his tears were unmanly. To me they were the bitter cry of a great heart, and I wanted to follow him and say, "Take me. Do what you like with me. I am yours."
I did not do so. I sat a long time where he had left me and then I went into my room and locked the door.
I did not cry. Unjust and cruel as his reproaches had been, I began to have a strange wild joy in them. I knew that he would not have insulted me like that if he had not loved me to the very verge of madness itself.
Hours passed. Price came tapping at my door to ask if she should lock up the house—meaning the balcony. I answered "No, go to bed."
I heard the deadened thud of Martin's footsteps on the lawn passing to and fro. Sometimes they paused under my window and then I had a feeling, amounting to certainty, that he was listening to hear if I was sobbing, and that if I had been he would have broken down my bedroom door to get to me.
At length I heard him come up the stone stairway, shut and bolt the balcony door, and walk heavily across the corridor to his own room.
The day was then dawning. It was four o'clock.
SIXTY-EIGHTH CHAPTER
I awoke on Wednesday morning in a kind of spiritual and physical fever. Every conflicting emotion which a woman can experience in the cruel battle between her religion and her love seemed to flood body and soul—joy, pain, pride, shame, fear, rapture—so that I determined (not without cause) to make excuse of a headache to stay in bed.