She nodded, but scarce a word, save a murmured farewell, escaped her dry lips.
He was changed, sadly changed, she knew. She turned from him with overflowing heart, stifling her tears, but with a veritable volcano of emotion within her young breast.
He had changed—changed entirely and utterly in that brief hour and a half they had walked together. What had she said? What had she done? she asked herself.
Forward she went blindly with the blood-red light of the glorious sunset full in her hard-set face, the great fortress-crowned hills looming up before her, a barrier between herself and the beyond! They looked grey, dark, mysterious as her own future.
She glanced back, but he had turned upon his heel, and she now saw his retreating figure swinging along the straight, broad highway.
Why had he treated her thus? Was it possible, she reflected, that he had actually become aware of the ghastly truth? Had he divined it?
"If he has," she cried aloud in an agony of soul, "then no wonder—no wonder, indeed, that he has cast me from his life as a criminal—as a woman to be avoided as the plague—that he has said good-bye to me for ever!"
Her lips trembled, and the corners of her pretty mouth hardened.
She turned again to watch the man's disappearing figure.
"I would go back," she cried in despair, "back to him, and beg his forgiveness upon my knees. I love him—love him better than my life! Yet to crave forgiveness would be to confess—to tell all I know—the whole awful truth! And I can't do that—no, never! God help me! I—I—I—can't do that!"