“Nor may we help each other.”
The sky had darkened; a cloud seemed to have dimmed the sun. A wind woke restless in the woods and the flowers shivered in the waning sunlight. Joan had risen from the altar. She held her hat in her hand, but did not look at Gabriel as he stood in silence at her side.
“I wonder if I shall ever see you again,” she said.
The man had grown pale, and his eyes were stern, yet miserable.
“Perhaps,” he answered.
“I shall think of you.”
“And I also.”
“Good-bye.”
As by a sudden inspiration he kissed her hand as he had kissed it by the Mallan water. When she had left him he remained by the crumbling altar, with its screen of purple nightshade, staring out over the sea. Man-wise, he would have given heaven to have left unsaid the words he had spoken to the girl that day.
The same night he read a letter from Ophelia, a letter garrulous with vapid passion, decreeing the day when they should wed. Gabriel sat by the window as the dusk came down and watched the night embalm the world in gloom. A sonnet fell from his lips as he brooded. He wrote it down, a rough scrawl in the twilight.