"You can't mean that." He bent toward the ground and uttered a low moan, and yet his face was ablaze with triumphant light.
"I do mean it," she reiterated, "and if you think your running away would save me from silly, weak-minded embarrassment, you must know that it would kill me. Yes, Charlie, I tell you now that if you leave me and I fail to see you again I'll end my life."
She had stepped close to him and he suddenly drew back.
"Your brothers are looking this way," he warned her.
"I don't care," she blurted out, desperately. "They may know. They adore you as I do. I'll tell them how I feel. They are human. They will understand."
"They would not want you"—Charles sighed—"want you to care for a man who may any day be thrust into jail. Brought up as you have been brought up, with your family back of you, they could not want you to care for a man whose life is the deplorable wreck mine is. Our parting is inevitable. I've tried to see it otherwise for a long time, but in vain. I am responsible for the blight that is on me, and I must bear it to the end. Maybe I can tell you more, honorably tell you more, some day, but I cannot do so now. But, after all, even that mild justification would do no good. I shall never forget you, but it is your duty to forget me. Women do forget such things, but I shall hold you in my mind and soul forever."
Kenneth was approaching to ask some question of Charles, and in order to hide her distraught face from her brother's view Mary lifted the basket and moved away.
That night the family, including the two boys, sat on the veranda after supper. Rowland deported himself as if nothing very remarkable had happened in the escape of his sons, but they themselves acted like persons completely changed in character. Kenneth had lost his vaunting air of self-assertion and overconfidence, and was very quiet. Martin was effervescing with the sense of his release from the dangers he feared and half lay, half sat with his head in his sister's lap. Mary's hands were gently stroking back his hair, and now and then she bent and whispered something mother-like and tender in his ear.
Dreading another reference from the family to the part he had played in their rescue, Charles got up and went to his room. He was tired, but not conscious of it, and not at all sleepy, for his brain was in a whirl with thoughts of what had happened, together with grim cogitations on the course he was trying to lay out for his future guidance.
His reason told him that two courses only lay before him. The more logical seemed to be his abrupt disappearance from the spot which had become so dear to him. The other alternative was to return to Boston and appeal to William to release him from his agreement. This temptation was by far the greater, and for a moment, in his fancy, it mastered him. That girl—that wonderful girl down-stairs with her brother's head in her lap—might then become his wife. "Wife! wife! wife!"—the very word thrilled him through and through. He was seated on the edge of his bed, his hardened hands clasped between his knees. His muscles were taut, his face was wet with perspiration; it trickled in cold drops down his neck onto his strong chest. Then another vision was spread before his mental sight. He pictured William as he had last seen him at his desk in the bank at night. He saw himself standing there telling the brother, whom he really loved, that he had come back to undo the thing that he himself had proposed. He saw the dumb appeal in the cowering man's eyes.