She
quickly dropped her head again; she shifted her position; a band seemed to
tighten around her throat; until, in a voice hardly to be heard, she
murmured falteringly:
"I have promised to marry Joseph."
He did not speak or move, but continued to stand leaning against the lintel
of the doorway, looking down on her. The colour was fading from the west
leaving it ashen white. And so standing in the dying radiance, he saw the
long bright day of his young hope come to its close; he drained to its dregs
his cup of bitterness she had prepared for him; learned his first lesson in
the victory of little things over the larger purposes of life, over the
nobler planning; bit the dust of the heart's first defeat and tragedy.
She had caught up the iron shears in her nervousness and begun to cut the
flaxen thread; and in the silence of the room only the rusty click was now
heard as she clipped it, clipped it, clipped it.
Then such a greater trembling seized her that she laid the shears back upon
the table. Still he did not move or speak, and there seemed to fall upon her
conscience--in insupportable burden until, as if by no will of her own, she
spoke again pitifully:
"I didn't know that you cared so much for me.
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