But that afternoon Eugene Hautville, who had gone all this time the long way to the village, felt his own instincts, or the natural towardness of his heart, too strong for him.  Often, watching from a distance across the fields, he had seen a pale flutter of skirts in the lane, and knew well enough that Dorothy was there, and had turned back; but this time he walked on.  When he came to Dorothy he cast one glance at her, then set his face sternly and kept on, with his heart pulling him back at every step.  Dorothy did not open her eyes until he had fairly passed her, and then she looked and saw him going away from her without a word.  Then she gave a little cry that no one could have interpreted with any written language.  She called not Eugene by his name; she said no word; but her heart gave that ancient cry for its lover which was before all speech; and that human love-call drowned out suddenly all the others.

But when Eugene stopped and turned, Dorothy blushed so before his eyes that her very neck and arms glowed pink through her lace tucker and sleeves.  She shrank away, twisting herself and hiding her face, so that he could see naught of her but the flow of her muslin skirts and her curling fair locks.

Eugene stood a minute looking at her.  His dark face was as red as Dorothy’s.  He made a motion towards her, then drew back and held up his head resolutely.

“It is a pleasant day,” he said, as if they were exchanging the everyday courtesies of life; and then when she made no reply, he added that he hoped she was quite recovered from her sickness.

And then he was pressing on again, white in the face now and wrestling fiercely with himself that he might, as it were, pass his own heart which stood in the way; but Dorothy rose up, with a sob, and pressed before him, touching his arm with her slender one in her lace sleeve, and shaking out like any flower the rose and lavender scent in her garments.

“I want to speak to you,” she said, and strove in vain to command her voice.

Eugene bowed and tried to smile, and waited, and looked above her head, through the tree branches into the field.

“I want to know if—­you are angry with me because—­I would not—­marry Burr,” said Dorothy, catching her breath between her words.

“I told you that you had no reason—­that he was not guilty,” Eugene said, with a kind of stern doggedness; and still he did not look at her.

“I could not marry—­him,” Dorothy panted, softly.

“I told you you had no reason,” Eugene said again, as if he were saying a lesson that he had taught himself.

“Are you angry—­with me because I could not marry him?” Dorothy asked, with her soft persistency in her own line of thought, and not his.

Then Eugene in desperation looked down at her, and saw her face worn into sweet wistfulness by her illness, her dilated eyes and lips parted and quivering into sobs, like a baby’s.