She looked at him. A keen, practical, continent face, with small mercy for whims and shallow reasons. Whatever feeling or gloom lay beneath, a blunt man, a truth-speaker, bewildered by feints or shams. She must give a reason for what she did. The word she spoke would be written in his memory, ineffaceable. He waited. She could not speak; she looked at the small vigilant figure: it meant all that the world held for her of good.
"You must go, Douglas, and never come again."
He was silent,—his eye contracted, keen, piercing.
"There is a great gulf between us, Douglas Palmer. I dare not cross it."
He smiled.
"You mean—the war?—your father?"
She shook her head; the words balked in her throat. Why did not God help her? Was not she right? She put her hand upon his sleeve,—her face, from which all joy and color seemed to have fallen forever, upturned to his.
"Douglas, you do not believe—as I do."
He noted her look curiously, as she said it, with an odd remembrance of once when she was a child, and they had shown her for the first time a dead body, that she had turned to the sky the same look of horror and reproach she gave him now.
"I have prayed, and prayed,"—an appealing cry in every low breath. "It is of no use,—no use! God never denied me a prayer but that,—only that!"