“No!” said Easton. “I love you too much for that.”
“And it is all over, then? Do you break your engagement?”
“It’s broken. You must go free of me. I know you would try to give me what you cannot; but only misery could come of trying. It would be worse than my mistake with Gilbert, when I accepted a sacrifice from him that no man should accept from another, because I believed that I could have done as much for him. We thought it our bond of friendship, but it must always have been a galling chain to him. And you are asking to do a thousand times more than he did! No, no; you would only be starving yourself to beggar me. If you loved me, all that’s happened would be nothing; but if you had married me, without loving me, you would have done me a wrong that I could never have pardoned. Don’t accuse yourself,” he said. “If you had loved me, nothing of all this could have happened. Think of that. It was my mistake more than yours; you were unfairly bound to me. Come,” he said, rising with a sudden access of strength that belied his pale looks, “I must go to-day.” And he led the way back to the house in a silence which neither broke.
She did not answer him by words, then or afterward. But when they entered the dark of the hall doorway together, she expressed all by an action which was not the less characteristic for being so humble and childlike; she caught up his hand, and, holding it a moment with a clinging stress, carried it to her mouth and reverently kissed it. That was their farewell, and it was both silent and passive on his part. He looked at her with eyes that she did not meet, and moved his lips as if he would say something, but made no sound.
Chapter XIV
THE next morning, after Mrs. Farrell had gone, Rachel went with mechanical exactness about the work of putting in order the room where Easton had lain sick. Her mother came to the door and, looking in, hesitated a moment before she crossed the threshold and sat down in the chair that stood just inside.
“I don’t know as you’ve got any call to hurry so about it, Rachel,” she said, with a granite quiet.
“I’d just as soon, mother; I’d rather,” answered the girl, as stonily, not ceasing from her work.
The mother put her hand to her passive mouth and then rubbed it up over her cheek and across her forehead, and drew a long, noiseless breath, following the movements of her daughter about the room with her eyes. “I suppose we sha’n’t hear from Benny, hardly, for a week or more,” she said, after a pause of several minutes. Rachel did not reply, and her mother asked, after another pause, “Rachel, what do you believe made him so set on going away? Do you think it was—”
“I don’t want you should ask me, mother, anything,” answered Rachel, nervously.