“Shall I read?” he asked.
The woman’s face stood clear––cruelly clear––in the sunlight; about her mouth and eyes there was an expression which, from repetition, we have learned to associate with the circle surrounding a new-made grave: an expression hopelessly desperate, desperately hopeless.
Of a sudden her chin trembled and her face dropped into her hands.
“Read, if you wish”; and the smooth brown head, with its thread of gray, trembled uncontrollably.
“Eleanor!” with a sudden vibration of tenderness in his voice. “Eleanor,” he repeated.
But the woman made no response.
The man had taken a step forward; now he sat down again, looking through the open doorway at the stretch of green prairie, with the road, a narrow ribbon of brown, dividing it fair in the middle. In the distance a farmer’s wagon was rumbling toward town, a trail of fine dust, like smoke, suspended in the air behind. It rattled past, and the big collie on 167 the step woke to give furious chase in its wake, then returned slowly, a little conscious under the stranger’s eye, to sleep as before. Asa Arnold sat through it all, still as one devitalized; an expression on his face no man had ever seen before; one hopeless, lonely, akin to that of the woman.
“Read, if you wish,” repeated Camilla, bitterly.
For a long minute her companion made no motion.
“It’s unnecessary,” he intoned at last. “You know as well as I that neither of us will ever forget one word it contains.” He hesitated and his voice grew gentle. “Eleanor, you know I didn’t come here to insult you, or to hurt you needlessly;––but I’m human. You seem to forget this. You brand me less than a man, and then ask of me the unselfishness of a God!”