He raised his head and gazed steadily at her. Then he said, challengingly, “You wish me to love another?”
She looked away from him and was silent. Gradually there crept into his eyes a look of hope; and hope was slowly turning into exultation when she spoke, so softly that he barely could hear her, “Yes.”
Then he said, altogether too calmly, in too commonplace a manner, “Oh, very well, since you wish it—”
And she said, very firmly, “I wish it!”
Slowly they returned to the house. The sun was setting, and there was gold and nacre and glowing blood in the sky. In the garden the wind stirred the leaves gently, and there was sorrow in their song.
Her husband awaited them. “Is n’t it a beautiful sunset?” he said to them from the piazza. “I suppose you’ve been looking at it. You might write a sonnet about it, my boy.”
She went up to the gray-haired man and kissed him on the lips, and leaned against him, until he wound his arm about her waist, and she rested her head on his shoulder caressingly; and then she looked defiantly at the young man, who had drawn near.
The young man’s hands closed tightly, and in his eyes there was disappointment and anger and some contempt. “Yes, John, I believe I could write a few elegies on the death of this Sun, who has shed his blood in his fight with Night, and has spattered it all over the sky, so that the angels will have to wash it off with their tears. Sunsets are my forte, anyway—”
“I have never seen any of your verses,” she said.
“Then you may congratulate yourself upon your lucky escape.”