Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/153

Rh She made no reply, and he added, rising: “But you’ll come back to it—you’ll come back often, I hope.”

He could not see her face in the dimness, but her voice trembled a little as she answered: “I will do what you tell me—but I shall be alone—against all the others: they don’t understand.”

The simplicity, the helplessness, of the avowal, appealed to him not as a weakness but as a grace. He understood what she was really saying: “How can you desert me? How can you put this great responsibility on me, and then leave me to bear it alone?” and in the light of her unuttered appeal his action seemed almost like cruelty. Why had he opened her eyes to wrongs she had no strength to redress without his aid?

He could only answer, as he walked beside her toward the edge of the wood: “You will not be alone—in time you will make the others understand; in time they will be with you.”

“Ah, you don’t believe that!” she exclaimed, pausing suddenly, and speaking with an intensity of reproach that amazed him.

“I hope it, at any rate,” he rejoined, pausing also. “And I’m sure that if you will come here oftener—if you’ll really live among your people”

“How can you say that, when you’re deserting them?” she broke in, with a feminine excess of inconsequence that fairly dashed the words from his lips. [ 137 ]