She suffered it, yet brokenly. She had lifted back a veil from the vestal treasures of her Inner Shrine and he had mocked those treasures somehow. So she believed.
“Carrie,” he promised, “I’ll wait for you, I’ll work for you, I’ll plan for you, I’ll bend all my effort and all my life to make you happy. And it will be very sweet when it comes, dear,—very sweet.”
Her eyes blinked at him several times in the dusk. She turned her face away without answering, off toward that distant arc lamp across the acres of rain-washed rushes.
“I’ll go!” she said in a strained voice. Then she hung her head suddenly.
Nathan raised her face again and drew her to him. Their lips met. But the perturbed boy suddenly shuddered. Carol’s lips were cold, unresponsive.
The boy’s joints were stiff. There was a bitter, brackish taste in his mouth. His head throbbed from lack of sleep. But from his finger he slipped a small bloodstone ring he had purchased the week following the “strike” with the first big money he had ever owned. He found the girl’s left hand. It was cold, lifeless. But the ring fitted her finger. He kissed it.
“Let it stay there dear—until—until——”
The girl turned away. At the door again she stood looking out. Around and around on her finger she turned the ring.
VI
They stole forth from the building and yard. And vivid to Nathan came memory of another day back in younger boyhood when he had stolen forth so from a wood,—back to a picnic ground, wondering why he was not entirely happy, why the kisses of a girl had become cloying and tasteless. Only with this difference: there was no father now to meet and flog him.