It would not be difficult to expand these doubts, to amplify these
reasons, and even to adduce others which occurred to the unhappy young
man as he climbed the hill. But enough has been said. Surely the
reader, no matter how removed in sympathy from that line of argument,
must be able now at least to sympathize, to perceive that Bennington de
Laney had some reason for thought, some excuse for the tardiness of his
steps as they carried him to a meeting with the girl he loved.
For he did love her, perhaps the more tenderly that doubts must,
perforce, arise. All these considerations affected not at all his
thought of her. But now, for the first time, Bennington de Laney was
weighing the relative claims of duty and happiness. His happiness
depended upon his love. That his duty to his race, his parents, his
caste had some reality in fact, and a very solid reality in his own
estimation, the author hopes he has shown. If not, several pages have
been written in vain.
The conflict in his mind had carried him to the Rock. Here, as he
expected, he found Mary already arrived. He ascended to the little
plateau and dropped wearily to the moss. His face had gone very white
in the last quarter of an hour.
"You see now why I asked you to come to-day," she said without
preliminary. "Now you have seen them, and there is nothing more to
conceal."
"I know, I know," he replied dully. "I am trying to think it out. I
can't see it yet."
They took entirely for granted that each knew the subject of the
other's thoughts. The girl seemed much the more self-possessed of the
two.
"We may as well understand each other," she said quietly, without
emotion. "You have told me a certain thing, and have asked me for a
certain answer. I could not give it to you before without deceiving
you. Now the answer depends on you. I have deceived you in a way," she
went on more earnestly, "but I did not mean to. I did not realize the
difference, truly I didn't, until I saw the girl on the train. Then I
knew the difference between her and me, and between her's and mine. And
when you turned away, I saw that you were her kind, and I saw, too,
that you ought to know everything there was about me. Then you spoke."
"I meant what I said, too," he interrupted. "You must believe that,
Mary, whatever comes."
"I was sorry you did," she went on, as though she had not heard him.
Then with just a touch of impatience tingeing the even calm of her
voice, "Oh, why will men insist on saying those things!" she cried.
"The way to win a girl is not thus. He should see her often, without
speaking of love, being everything to her, until at last she finds she
can not live without him."