John Sherman; and, Dhoya

by W. B. Yeats

She became in a moment perfectly white, and sat down as though attacked with faintness. Her hand on the edge of the chair trembled.

Sherman looked at her, and went on in a bewildered, mechanical way—“My betrothed is a Miss Leland. She has a good deal of money. You know my mother always wished me to marry some one with money. Her father, when alive, was an old client of Sherman and Saunders. She is much admired in society.” Gradually his voice became a mere murmur. He did not seem to know that he was speaking. He stopped entirely. He was looking at Mary Carton.

Everything around him was as it had been some three years before. The table was covered with cups and the floor with crumbs. Perhaps the mouse pulling at a crumb under the table was the same mouse as on that other evening. The only difference was the brooding daylight of summer and the ceaseless chirruping of the sparrows in the ivy outside. He had a confused sense of having lost his way. It was just the same feeling he had known as a child, when one dark night he had taken a wrong turning, and instead of arriving at his own house, found himself at a landmark he knew was miles from home.

A moment earlier, however difficult his life, the issues were always definite; now suddenly had entered the obscurity of another’s interest.

Before this it had not occurred to him that Mary Carton had any stronger feeling for him than warm friendship.

He began again, speaking in the same mechanical way—“Miss Leland lives with her mother near us. She is very well educated and very well connected, though she has lived always among business people.”

Miss Carton, with a great effort, had recovered her composure.

“I congratulate you,” she said. “I hope you will be always happy. You came here on some business for your firm, I suppose? I believe they have some connection with the town still.”

“I only came here to tell you I was going to be married.”

“Do you not think it would have been better to have written?” she said, beginning to put away the children’s tea-things in a cupboard by the fireplace.