"Don't be mad at me," she said, soothingly. "If you understood everything you would not be."
Understood everything? Did she mean now that her engagement to Eperson would explain, justify all that had taken place?
"I do understand," he said, aloud, his cheeks twitching, his lips tight, his eyes gleaming. He had stopped short and now stood fairly panting, facing her.
"Oh, you don't—you don't!" she insisted. "Nobody knows, but myself and Joel, how he feels. I have tried to do right by him, and once I thought that in time I might feel otherwise, but it is impossible. I love him dearly in a certain way, but it is not as a woman ought to feel toward the one man in all the world for her—the one given by God Himself. Joel loves me in that way, and I am very, very unhappy about it. I see—I see—you thought to-night that he and I— But never mind. I was only trying to get him to take a brighter view, for he is very, very dejected."
"You mean to tell me, looking straight in my eyes," John cried—"you a truthful girl—you mean to tell me that you don't love him?"
Tilly, with eyes full to their brink with sincerity, and in a voice that rang true to its maidenly depths, answered: "No, I do not love him as—as a wife ought to love her husband. I've tried, but I can't."
The moonlight seemed filled with darting arrows of bliss made as visible as rockets against a black sky. John felt as if the vast earth were rocking his fears to sleep. He took her hand and drew it into its place on his arm. The ground seemed to fall away from each step he took as they moved forward.
"I see, I see," he heard himself saying; "then it doesn't make any difference. Poor devil! That's what ailed him, eh? No wonder! No wonder!"
Tilly's gentle pressure was on his arm and he was afraid she would feel the wild throbs of his being, for, strong man that he was, he was as much ashamed of them as of a secret sin. How could he open those joy-tied lips of his and tell her how he felt—how he had felt since his first sight of her? He tried to summon words that would be adequate, and failed utterly. But Tilly knew. She seemed to gather a knowledge of his emotions from the very moonlit silence that pervaded the fields and the woods around them.
Suddenly she began to quicken her step. "We must walk faster," she said, sighing, as one in joyous slumber about to wake. "Mother and father may hear the buggies passing and think we ought to be home earlier. You see, it is Saturday night, and if I'm out after midnight father says it is breaking the Sabbath and is angry."