“No? I thought you had forgotten me just now. Well, you had better go away; I don’t send you, but you had better go; and you had better forget me. Your fortnight is just up to-day: better go to-day. Come, here are both my hands for good-by. When you’ve put two hundred miles between us, perhaps you can think more clearly about it all.”
He took her hands, which she held out to him, smiling, and bowed his lips upon them in the utter surrender of his love.
“Why, you are really in my hands,” she murmured. A light of triumph burned in her dark eyes, but one could not have said that as a woman she had not a right to the few and fleeting triumphs that love gives her sex, on which it lays so many heavy burdens. “Then,” she said, “you must do as I bid you. Come, let me go, now;” and she withdrew her hands and rose to her feet, and flung her shawl over her arm. “You must not talk of liking me, any more, till you are friends with Gilbert again. You may make up with him how and when you will, but you must not speak to me till you tell me you are reconciled. I can’t forgive myself till I know that you’ve made up at my expense. Tell him that it piqued and irritated me to see you such friends, and that I could not rest till I had got a clew to your secret; that I didn’t really mean any harm; but that I was altogether to blame. Will you obey?”
“No!” said Easton, so fiercely that Mrs. Farrell started with a sudden shock of panic that left no trace of persiflage in her tone, while she walked humbly before him with downcast head. How could he be angry with her? His whole heart yearned upon her as they moved on through the hollow, and came from its gloom at last upon the open meadow. “I didn’t mean to offend you,” she added, then. “I was only trying to show you how much in earnest I was about having you and Gilbert friends again; I couldn’t be happy if I thought I had hurt your feelings.”
“I will obey you,” said Easton, sadly.
“You will make up with him?” she asked.
“If he will let me. God knows I want to do it.”
“Then you may spare me all you like. You’re not angry now?”
“And you’re going to be real patient with me, about—that little answer?”