He had got on the gravel again, in his sudden, angry step backward, and turned on his heel, crushing the pebbles with a sound that seemed to jar through all the atmosphere. After he had gone a few steps he paused, as if expecting to be called back. But Rosalind’s heart was all aflame. She said to herself, indignantly, that to believe such a man had anything to tell her was folly, was a shame to think of, was impossible. To chaffer and bargain with him, to promise him anything--her love, oh Heaven! how dared he ask it?--was intolerable. She turned away with hot, feminine impulse, and a step in which there was no pause or wavering; increasing the distance between them at a very different rate from that achieved by his lingering steps. It seemed that he expected to be recalled after she had disappeared altogether and hidden herself, panting, among the shadows; for she could still hear his step pause with that jar and harsh noise upon the gravel for what seemed to her, in her excitement, an hour of suspense. And Rosalind’s heart jarred, as did all the echoes. Harsh vibrations of pain went through and through it. The rending away of her own self-illusion in respect to him, which was not unmingled with a sense of guilt--for that illusion had been half voluntary, a fiction of her own creating, a refuge of the imagination from other thoughts--and at the same time a painful sense of his failure, and proof of the floating doubt and fear which had always been in her mind on his account, wounded and hurt her with almost a physical reality of pain. And what was this suggestion, cast into the midst of this whirlpool of agitated and troubled thought?--“I could tell you; I could make it easy for you to see; I could clear up--” What? oh what, in the name of Heaven! could he mean?