"I do not know, but I am most anxious to see him--to thank him--" "I am told that he left town at four o'clock. Perhaps you know his address in New York?" "I do not," she answered coldly. "No doubt he went away hurriedly ... frightened of you because of his kindness to me." She came a step forward to the gate. Instantly his thought veered back to her and his tense face softened. "How can I blame you," he said hurriedly, "for thinking the worst of me? I've been thinking badly enough of myself, God knows. But don't you know, can't you imagine, that nothing could have held me to the miserable business a single moment after I saw you, had I not been bound by a solemn promise to your poor father?" "My father! Oh, if he is the sort of man to plot a thing like this, and to bludgeon my mother into it, how could you endure to _promise_ to do it for him?" "Because he is breaking his heart for you, and you didn't know it. It seemed right that he should see you, since he wants to so much." All her sense of the wrong he had done her flared up in anger at that. "How do _you_--_dare_ say what seems right between my father and me? He is breaking his heart for me, he told you? Did he mention to you that she had _broken_ hers for him? Don't you suppose that I have had time--and reasons--to decide which of them I belong to?" "All this," he said, "was before I knew you." About them hung the stillness of the country and the long empty road. The woods stirred; a bird called; a portly hare poked his nose through the brush over the way, and suddenly scuttled off, his white flag up. In Mrs, Thurston's yard, the quiet was profound. "All his life," said Mary Carstairs, "my father has thought about nothing but himself. I am sorry for him--but he must take the consequences of that now. If he is lonely, it is his own making. If my mother has been lonely till it has almost killed her, that is his doing, too. For you--there was never any place in this. As for me, I owe him nothing. He must beg my mother's forgiveness before he shall ever get mine." She came forward another half-step and laid her hand upon the gate-latch with a movement whose definiteness did not escape him. "You may take back that answer from me if you wish. And so, good-bye." "Not good-bye," said Varney, instantly. "You must not say that." "I am quite sure that I have nothing else left to say." Her eyes went past him over the gate, out into the wood beyond. Dusk was falling about them; it shaded her face, intangibly altered it, made it for the moment almost as he had known it before. She looked very young, and tired. This was the picture of her, and he knew it then as he looked at her, that he would carry with him to the longest day he lived.