“Ever since I have loved you, I have realized what I should have to tell you if you ever returned my love.  Sometimes duty has seemed one thing, sometimes another.  This is why I have waited so long—­more than two years; the way was not clear.  Isabel, it will never be clear.  I believe now it is wrong to tell you; I believe It is wrong not to tell you.  I have thought and thought—­it is wrong either way.  But the least wrong to you and to myself—­that is what I have always tried to see, and as I understand my duty, now that you are willing to unite your life with mine, there is something you must know.”

He added the last words as though he had reached a difficult position and were announcing his purpose to hold it.  But he paused gloomily again.

She had scarcely heard him through wonderment that he could so change at such a moment.  Her happiness began to falter and darken like departing sunbeams.  She remained for a space uncertain of herself, knowing neither what was needed nor what was best; then she spoke with resolute deprecation: 

“Why discuss with me your past life?  Have I not known you always?”

These were not the words of girlhood.  She spoke from the emotions of womanhood, beginning to-night in the plighting of her troth.

“You have trusted me too much, Isabel.”

Repulsed a second time, she now fixed her large eyes upon him with surprise.  The next moment she had crossed lightly once more the widening chasm.

“Rowan,” she said more gravely and with slight reproach, “I have not waited so long and then not known the man whom I have chosen.”

“Ah,” he cried, with a gesture of distress.

Thus they sat:  she silent with new thoughts; he speechless with his old ones.  Again she was the first to speak.  More deeply moved by the sight of his increasing excitement, she took one of his hands into both of hers, pressing it with a delicate tenderness.

“What is it that troubles you, Rowan?  Tell me!  It is my duty to listen.  I have the right to know.”

He shrank from what he had never heard in her voice before—­disappointment in him.  And it was neither girlhood nor womanhood which had spoken now:  it was comradeship which is possible to girlhood and to womanhood through wifehood alone:  she was taking their future for granted.  He caught her hand and lifted it again and again to his lips; then he turned away from her.

Thus shut out from him again, she sat looking out into the night.

But in a woman’s complete love of a man there is something deeper than girlhood or womanhood or wifehood:  it is the maternal—­that dependence on his strength when he is well and strong, that passion of protection and defence when he is frail or stricken.  Into her mood and feeling toward him even the maternal had forced its way.  She would have found some expression for it but he anticipated her.