"You meant, as I understand it, the gate between friendship and the ever so much more which lies beyond?"
And Pamela repeated his word. "Yes," she said. "But one cannot open that gate at will. It opens of itself at a touch, or it stays shut."
"Say, rather, that I have raised a hand towards the gate, but that I am afraid to try." And she turned her face to him at last. Her eyes were very wistful.
They stopped upon the grass bank of the stream at the end of the avenue. Pamela looked down into the dark, swiftly running water, and went on choosing each word, testing it, as it were, before she uttered it.
"You see that new road beyond the gate is no new road to me. I have trodden it before, and crept back--broken. Therefore, I am afraid." She paused. Warrisden was aware from her attitude that she had not finished. He did not stir lest he should check what more remained to say, and that remnant never be spoken at all. And it was well for him that he did not stir; for she said, in the same clear, low voice which she had hitherto used, and just as steadily--
"I am the more afraid because I think that if I did touch that gate it might open of itself."
She had begun, in a word, to feel premonitions of that suspense and of that glowing life in which for a few brief months she had once been steeped. Did she expect a letter from Warrisden, there was an eagerness in her anticipation with which she was well familiar. Was the letter delayed, there was a keenness in her disappointment which was like the pang of an old wound. And this recognition that the good days might come again, as in a cycle, brought to her very vividly the memory of the bad black days which had followed. Fear of those latter days, and the contrast of their number with the number of those which had gone before, drove her back. For those latter days in their turn might come round again.
Warrisden looked at her and his heart filled with pity for the great trouble which had overwhelmed her. She stood by his side with the sunlight playing upon her face and her hair--a girl brilliant with life, ripe to turn its possibilities into facts; and she shrank from the ordeal, so hardly had she been hit! She was by nature fearless, yet was she desperately afraid.