They sat without speaking; then he drew a deep breath and said, "Well, I suppose I ought to go." His head rested on his hand which was supported by an arm of the chair. He did not offer to rise.
She rose and went to him, kneeling before him. She put her hands upon his shoulders, and he put them aside, and she felt him shudder. She moaned, and looked up at him. Her face was close to his, but he did not come closer. He stared at her dumbly, and kept shaking his head as if asking some mute question too deep for words. Then he put out his hand and took hers. He put it against his cheek and held it in both his own. She did not take her eyes from his face, but his eyes began to wander.
"I will never see you again, Bob—I mean like this." She paused.
There was no life in his hands, and hers slipped away unrestrained. "How sweet the lilacs smell to-night," he said as he drew in a deep breath. He leaned back that he might breathe more freely, and added as he sighed, "I shall smell them through eternity—Molly." Then he rose and broke off a spray. He helped her rise and said, "Well—so this is the way of it." His handsome fair face was white in the moonlight, and she saw that his hair was thinning at the temples, and the strange flash of familiarity with it all came again as she inhaled the fragrance of the lilacs.
She trembled with some chill of inner grief, and cried vehemently, "Oh, Bob—my boy—my boy—say you hate me—for God's love, say you hate me." She came so close to him that she touched him, then she crumpled against the side of the seat in a storm of tears, but he looked at her steadily and shook his head.
"Come on, Molly. It's too cool for you out here," he said, and took her hand and walked with her to the steps. She was blinded by her weeping, and he helped here to the veranda, but he stopped on a lower step where his face was on a level with hers, and dropping her hand, he said, "Well, good night, Molly—good night—" and as he half turned from her, he said in the same voice, "Good-by."
He went quickly down the walk—a tall stalwart figure, and he carried his hat in his hand, and wiped his forehead as he went. At the gate he looked back and saw her standing where he had left her; he could still hear the pitiful sobs, but he made no sign to her, and she heard him walking away under the elms into the night. When his steps had ceased she ran on tiptoe, holding her breath to silence her sobs, through the hall, up the stairs of the silent home to her room, and locked the door. When she could not pray, she lay sobbing and groaning through a long night.