Part 28 (1/2)

She was prepared for the question, yet she took her time to answer it.

And the answer when at last she gave it was no answer at all.

”I do not know,” she said, in a low clear voice.

Warrisden looked at her. The profile of her face was towards him. He wondered for the thousandth time at its beauty and its gentleness. The broad, white forehead under the sweep of her dark hair, the big, dark eyes s.h.i.+ning beneath her brows, the delicate colour upon her cheeks, the curve of the lips. He wondered and longed. But he spoke simply and without extravagance, knowing that he would be understood.

”I have done nothing for you of the things men often do when a woman comes into their lives. I have tried to make no career. I think there are enough people making careers. They make the world very noisy, and they raise a deal of dust. I have just gone on living quietly as I did before, believing you would need no such proof.”

”I do not,” said Pamela.

”There might be much happiness for both of us,” he continued. And again she answered, without looking at him--

”I do not know.”

She was not evading him. Evasions, indeed, were never to her liking; and here, she was aware, were very serious issues.

”I have been thinking about you a great deal,” she said. ”I will tell you this. There is no one else. But that is not all. I can say too, I think, quite certainly, that there will be no one else. Only that is not enough, is it? Not enough, at all events, for you and me.”

Warrisden nodded his head.

”No, that is not enough,” he said gravely.

They walked on side by side in silence for a little while.

”It is only fair that I should be very frank with you,” she went on.

”I have been thinking so much about you in order that when you came again with this old question, as I knew you would, I might be quite clear and frank. Do you remember that you once spoke to me about the turnpike gate--the gate which I was to open and through which I was to go, like other men and women down the appointed road?”

”Yes, I remember.”

”You meant, as I understand it, the gate between friends.h.i.+p and the ever so much more which lies beyond?”

”Yes.”

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.”

”And it stays shut now?”

Pamela answered him at once--

”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 gra.s.s 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 att.i.tude 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 antic.i.p.ation 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.