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The Mettle of the Pasture

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heart had cried out that in a lifetime this was the one hour when he should not have given way to her or allowed her to say a word--when he should have borne her down with uncontrollable pleading. It was her own work that confronted her and she did not recognize it. She had exhausted resources to convince him of her determination to cast him off at once; to render it plain that further parley would to her be further insult. She had made him feel this on the night of his confession; in the note of direct repulse she sent him by the hand of a servant in her own house the following afternoon; by returning to him everything that he had ever given her; by her refusal to acknowledge his presence this evening beyond laying upon him a command; and by every word that she had just spoken. And in all this she had thought only of what she suffered, not of what he must be suffering. Perhaps some late instantaneous recognition of this flashed upon her as she started to leave him--as she looked at him sitting there, his face turned toward her in stoical acceptance of his fate. There was something in the controlled strength of it that touched her newly. She may have realized that if he had not been silent, if he had argued, defended himself, pleaded, she would have risen and walked back to the house without a word. It turned her nature toward him a little, that he placed too high a value upon her dismissal of him not to believe it irrevocable. Yet it hurt her: she was but one woman in the world; could the thought of this have made it easier for him to let her go away now without a protest? The air of the summer night grew unbearable for sweetness about her. The faint music of the ballroom had no pity for her. There young eyes found joy in answering eyes, passed on and found joy in others and in others. Palm met palm and then palms as soft and then palms yet softer. Some minutes before, the laughter of Marguerite in the shrubbery quite close by had startled Isabel. She had distinguished a voice. Now Marguerite's laughter reached her again--and there was a different voice with hers. Change! change! one put away, the place so perfectly filled by another. A white moth of the night wandered into Rowan's face searching its features; then it flitted over to her and searched hers, its wings fanning and clinging to her lips; and then it passed on, pursuing amid mistakes and inconstancies its life-quest lasting through a few darknesses. Fear suddenly reached down into her heart and drew up one question; and she asked that question in a voice low and cold and guarded: "Sometime, when you ask another woman to marry you, will you think it your duty to tell her?" "I will never ask any other woman." "I did not inquire for your intention; I asked what you would believe to be your duty." "It will never become my duty. But if it should, I would never marry without being true to the woman; and to be true is to tell the truth." "You mean that you would tell her?" "I mean that I would tell her." After a little silence she stirred in her seat and spoke, all her anger gone: "I am going to ask you, if you ever do, not to tell her as you have told me--after it is too late. If you cannot find some way of letting her know the truth before she loves you, then do not tell her afterward, when you have won her life away from her. If there is deception at all, then it is not worse to go on deceiving her than it was to begin to deceive her. Tell her, if you must, while she is indifferent and will not care, not after she has given herself to you and will then have to give you up. But what can you, a man, know what it means to a woman to tell her this! How can you know, how can you ever, ever know!" She covered her face with her hands and her voice broke with tears. "Isabel--" "You have no right to call me by my name, and I have no right to hear it, as though nothing were changed between us." "I have not changed." "How could you tell me! Why did you ever tell me!" she cried abruptly, grief breaking her down. "There was a time when I did not expect to tell you. I expected to do as other men do." "Ah, you would have deceived me!" she exclaimed, turning upon him with fresh suffering. "You would have taken advantage of my ignorance and have married me and never have let me know! And you would have called that deception love and you would have called yourself a true man!" "But I did not do this! It was yourself who helped me to see that the beginning of morality is to stop lying and deception." "But if you had this on your conscience already, what right had you ever to come near me?" "I had come to love you!" "Did your love of me give you the right to win mine?" "It gave me the temptation." "And what did you expect when you determined to tell me this? What did you suppose such a confession would mean to me? Did you imagine that while it was still fresh on your lips, I would smile in your face and tell you it made no difference? Was I to hear you speak of one whose youth and innocence you took away through her frailties, and then step joyously into her place? Was this the unfeeling, the degraded soul you thought to be mine? Would I have been worthy even of the poor love you could give me, if I had done that?" "I expected you to marry me! I expected you to forgive. I have this at least to remember: I lost you honestly when I could have won you falsely." "Ah, you have no right to seek any happiness in what is all sadness to me! And all the sadness, the ruin of everything, comes from your wrong-doing." "Remember that my wrong-doing did not begin with me. I bear my share: it is enough: I will bear no more." A long silence followed. She spoke at last, checking her tears: "And so this is the end of my dream! This is what life has brought me to! And what have I done to deserve it? To leave home, to shun friends, to dread scandal, to be misjudged, to bear the burden of your secret and share with you its shame, to see my years stretch out before me with no love in them, no ambitions, no ties--this is what life has brought me, and what have I done to deserve it?" As her tears ceased, her eyes seemed to be looking into a future that lacked the relief of tears. As though she were already passed

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