“No one else has any right to know it.  I have told you that.”

“Then that is all!”

She gave a quick dismissal to the subject, so putting an end to the interview.

She started to rise from her seat; but impulses, new at the instant, checked her:  all the past checked her, all that she was herself and all that he had been to her.

Perhaps what at each moment had angered her most was the fact that she was speaking, not he.  She knew him to be of the blood of silent men and to have inherited their silence.  This very trait of his had rendered association with him so endearing.  Love had been so divinely apart from speech, either his or her own:  most intimate for having been most mute.  But she knew also that he was capable of speech, full and strong and quick enough upon occasion; and her heart had cried out that in a lifetime this was the one hour when he should not have given way to her or allowed her to say a word—­when he should have borne her down with uncontrollable pleading.

It was her own work that confronted her and she did not recognize it.  She had exhausted resources to convince him of her determination to cast him off at once; to render it plain that further parley would to her be further insult.  She had made him feel this on the night of his confession; in the note of direct repulse she sent him by the hand of a servant in her own house the following afternoon; by returning to him everything that he had ever given her; by her refusal to acknowledge his presence this evening beyond laying upon him a command; and by every word that she had just spoken.  And in all this she had thought only of what she suffered, not of what he must be suffering.

Perhaps some late instantaneous recognition of this flashed upon her as she started to leave him—­as she looked at him sitting there, his face turned toward her in stoical acceptance of his fate.  There was something in the controlled strength of it that touched her newly.  She may have realized that if he had not been silent, if he had argued, defended himself, pleaded, she would have risen and walked back to the house without a word.  It turned her nature toward him a little, that he placed too high a value upon her dismissal of him not to believe it irrevocable.

Yet it hurt her:  she was but one woman in the world; could the thought of this have made it easier for him to let her go away now without a protest?

The air of the summer night grew unbearable for sweetness about her.  The faint music of the ballroom had no pity for her.  There young eyes found joy in answering eyes, passed on and found joy in others and in others.  Palm met palm and then palms as soft and then palms yet softer.  Some minutes before, the laughter of Marguerite in the shrubbery quite close by had startled Isabel.  She had distinguished a voice.  Now Marguerite’s laughter reached her again—­and there was a different voice with hers.  Change! change! one put away, the place so perfectly filled by another.