I looked away from her for the pleasure of looking at her again, of realizing that my overwrought senses were not cheating me. Yes, there she was, in all the luster of that magnetic beauty I cannot think of even now without an up-blazing of the fire which is to the heart what the sun is to the eyes of a blind man dreaming of sight. There she was on my side of the chasm that had separated us—alone with me—mine—mine! And my heart dilated with pride. But a moment later came a sense of humility. Her beauty intoxicated me, but her youth, her fineness, so fragile for such rough hands as mine, awed and humbled me. “I must be very gentle,” said I to myself. “I have promised that she shall never regret. God help me to keep my promise! She is mine, but only to preserve and protect.” And that idea of responsibility in possession was new to me—was to have far-reaching consequences. Now I think it changed the whole course of my life.
She was leaning forward, her elbow on the casement of the open window of the brougham, her cheek against her hand; the moonlight was glistening on her round, firm forearm and on her serious face. “How far, far away from—everything it seems here!” she said, her voice tuned to that soft, clear light, “and how beautiful it is!” Then, addressing the moon and the shadows of the trees rather than me: “I wish I could go on and on—and never return to—to the world.”
“I wish we could,” said I.
My tone was low, but she started, drew back into the brougham, became an outline in the deep shadow. In another mood that might have angered me. Just then it hurt me so deeply that to remember it to-day is to feel a faint ache in the scar of the long healed wound. My face was not hidden as was hers; so, perhaps, she saw. At any rate, her voice tried to be friendly as she said: “Well—I have crossed the Rubicon. And I don’t regret. It was silly of me to cry. I thought I had been through so much that I was beyond such weakness. But you will find me calm from now on, and reasonable.”
“Not too reasonable, please,” said I, with an attempt at her lightness. “A reasonable woman is as trying as an unreasonable man.”
“But we are going to be sensible with each other,” she urged, “like two friends. Aren’t we?”
“We are going to be what we are going to be,” said I. “We’ll have to take life as it comes.”
That clumsy reminder set her to thinking, stirred her vague uneasiness in those strange circumstances to active alarm. For presently she said, in a tone that was not quite so matter-of-course as she would have liked to make it: “We’ll go now to my uncle Frank’s. He’s a brother of my father. I always used to like him best—and still do. But he married a woman mamma thought—queer—and they hadn’t much—and he lives away up on the West Side—One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Street.”
“The wise plan, the only wise plan,” said I, not so calm as she must have thought me, “is to go to my partner’s house and send out for a minister.”
“Not to-night,” she replied, nervously. “Take me to uncle Frank’s, and to-morrow we can discuss what to do and how to do it.”