The cry was desperate, involuntary, forcing its way out from unfathomed depths of feeling below all his anger and resentment, and tearing him to pieces as it came.  It was as though he had taken his heart out and flung it at her feet.

Her face changed instantly and was quiveringly alight with a pale and guilty agitation.  “No . . . oh no, Vincent!  I thought you only . . .  I had thought you could not really . . .  Vincent, forgive me!  Forgive me!” She took one of his hands in both hers . . . the last unforgotten touch he was ever to have of her. . . .

* * * * *

It came to him through those words which he did not understand that she was pitying him; and stung to the quick, he drew back from her, frowning, with an angry toss of his head.

Instantly she drew back also, as though she had misinterpreted something.

He stood for an instant looking full at her as though he did not see her; and then with a wide gesture of utter bewilderment, strange from him, he passed her without a look.

This time he did not turn back, but continued steadily and resolutely on his way.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE FALL OF THE BIG PINE

August 2.

I

When Marise reached the place on the wood-road where she had had that last talk with Vincent Marsh, she stopped, postponing for a moment the errand to the Powers which she had so eagerly undertaken.  She stood there, looking up into the far green tops of the pines, seeing again that strange, angry, bewildered gesture with which he had renounced trying to make anything out of her, and had turned away.

It remained with her, constantly, as the symbol of what had happened, and she looked at it gravely and understandingly.  Then, very swiftly, she saw again that passing aspect of his which had so terribly frightened her, felt again the fear that he might be really suffering, that she might really have done a hurt to another human being.

This brought her a momentary return of the agitation it had caused in her that day, and she sat down abruptly on a tree-trunk, her knees trembling, her hands cold.

That fear had come as so totally unexpected a possibility, something which his every aspect and tone and word up to then had seemed to contradict.  Strange, how unmoved he had left her, till that moment!  Strange the impression of him, that first time after she had known herself strong enough to stand up and be herself, not the responsive instrument played on by every passing impression.  Strange, how instantly he had felt that, and how passionate had been his resentment of her standing up to be herself, her being a grown woman, a human being, and not a flower to be plucked.  How he had hated it, and alas! how lamentable his hatred of it had made him appear.  What a blow he had dealt to her conception of him by his instant assumption that a change in her could only mean that Neale had been bullying her.  It had been hard to see him so far away and diminished as that had made him seem, so entirely outside her world.  It had dealt a back-hand blow to her own self-esteem to have him seem vulgar.