"It seems to me I ought to go right on--so soon as breakfast is over."
She weighed that with just the same still pause, the same quiet moment of lips and eyes that I recalled so well. It was as things had always been between us that she should make her decision first and bring me to it.
"It isn't natural," she decided, "with the sun rising and the day still freshly beginning that you should go or that I should go. I've wanted to meet you like this and talk about things,--ten thousand times. And as for me Stephen I _won't_ go. And I won't let you go if I can help it. Not this morning, anyhow. No. Go later in the day if you will, and let us two take this one talk that God Himself has given us. We've not planned it. It's His doing, not ours."
I sat, yielding. "I am not so sure of God's participation," I said. "But I know I am very tired, and glad to be with you. I can't tell you how glad. So glad---- I think I should weep if I tried to say it...."
"Three, four, five hours perhaps--even if people know. Is it so much worse than thirty minutes? We've broken the rules already; we've been flung together; it's not our doing, Stephen. A little while longer--adds so little to the offence and means to us----"
There was the briefest moment of reflection. "She's discretion itself," she said.
"If he's going to know the harm is done. We may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. And he won't know. No one will know."
"Nobody's here. Not a soul who matters. I doubt if they know my name.... No one ever talks to me."
I sat in the bright sunshine, profoundly enervated and quite convinced, but still maintaining out of mere indolence a show of hesitation....
"You take the good things God sends you, Stephen--as I do. You stay and talk with me now, before the curtain falls again. We've tired of letters. You stay and talk to me.
"Here we are, Stephen, and it's the one chance that is ever likely to come to us in all our lives. We'll keep the point of honor; and you shall go to-day. But don't let's drive the point of honor into the quick. Go easy Stephen, old friend.... My dear, my dear! What has happened to you? Have you forgotten? Of course! Is it possible for you to go, mute, with so much that we can say.... And these mountains and this sunlight!..."