"I will be back," Nancy told them, "but I want to walk. I shall feel better; then I can sleep in the chair all the way home."
She hurried round the upper paths of the settlement, passing houses which were heavy with slumber. The morning was still; the sun had not come up over the plains to waken the dragon flies into humming life. Nancy was trying to walk herself out of the desperate mood in which nothing she did seemed worth any pain. She had gained some satisfaction, when she was angry, from the heroism of returning to her father, which of course was only another way of saying to the marriage he had ordained. But now she was not angry, only sad. Her heroism was only like a memory of last night's acting lingering in the stale air, amid the litter and refuse of a stage, the morning after a great tragedy. The actors have gone, the theatre is given up to charwomen. So Nancy's heart was given up to dustpans and brooms. The anguish upon which she had wracked her spirit lay strewn across the floor of her soul like crumpled flowers. It was bad enough to be sacrificing so much that she loved to the demands of duty, but it was worse not to believe in the sacrifice.
In this mood Ronald overtook her.
"I am going back to my father," she announced, as though he had been following the debate in her mind and might try to prolong fruitless argument and score many profitless points.
"I don't doubt it," said Ronald, smiling gravely. "I don't doubt that you are going back. I didn't come to plague you with my efforts at persuasion. I wanted just one last walk with you, Nancy, to be at peace and happy because you are with me. I am wiser than I was yesterday, and I know you would have agreed if you could. So we'll let it rest at that, shall we?"
They walked quietly, enjoying the little things that caught their eyes, the brilliant touches of an early summer morning, "my namesake, the sun,"—as Ronald grimly remarked,—which came up from a saffron bed of clouds, far across the plains beyond Peking. Nancy was glad Ronald had found her. There was an unforced merriment to his talk which cheered her vexed mind. Her doubts vanished like the mist. He was well named "the sun," for his steadfast courtesy in defeat shed light on the misty passes of her will and helped her to see the rightness of the instinct which was taking her back to her father. The mountains had lost their vagueness of surface; the sun was etching the deep shadows of each ravine.
"Well, it is time we went back," said Ronald, after they had walked a long way and seen the sun leap high above the plains. "I am glad we had this walk, Nancy, because I didn't trust myself to say good-bye to you down there. I haven't given you up, you know; I will never do that, for I hope against hope that your father's prediction may yet come true."
He stopped for a moment.
"Ah, Nancy," he said, turning to the girl, "it's so hard, even now, to say good-bye to you."
She looked at him, frightened by the thought of never seeing him again, afraid of his never knowing that she did love him. Impossible wishes were in her heart, impossible words on her tongue, for it seemed so wrong that she should be offering herself only next month to a stranger and parting without a word of endearment for the friend, the lover, who filled the vivid horizon of this morning walk. This Western life and Western speech had been playing havoc with all Nancy's conventions. She was on the point of confessing her love for Ronald, a disastrous confession which could only complicate the unhappiness of their friendship, for she had not changed and would not change her intention of going back to her father as she had said.