“Well,” he said, with a smile that recognized her trepidation, “I will not persecute you.  I’ll renounce these pretensions.  But I’ll ask you to see me once more, as a friend,—­an acquaintance.”

“I will not see you again.”

“You are rather hard with me, I think,” he urged gently.  “I don’t think I’m playing the tyrant with you now.”

“You are,—­the baffled tyrant.”

“But if I promised not to offend again, why should you deny me your acquaintance?”

“Because I don’t believe you.”  She was getting nearer the door, and as she put her hand behind her and touched the knob, the wild terror she had felt, lest he should reach it first and prevent her escape, left her.  “You are treating me like a child that does n’t know its own mind, or has none to know.  You are laughing at me—­playing with me; you have shown me that you despise me.”

He actually laughed.  “Well, you’ve shown that you are not afraid of me.  Why are you not afraid?”

“Because,” she answered, and she dealt the blow now without pity, “I’m engaged,—­engaged to Mr. Libby!” She whirled about and vanished through the door, ashamed, indignant, fearing that if she had not fled, he would somehow have found means to make his will prevail even yet.

He stood, stupefied, looking at the closed door, and he made a turn or two about the room before he summoned intelligence to quit it.  When death itself comes, the sense of continuance is not at once broken in the survivors.  In these moral deaths, which men survive in their own lives, there is no immediate consciousness of an end.  For a while, habit and the automatic tendency of desire carry them on.

He drove back to Corbitant perched on the rickety seat of his rattling open buggy, and bowed forward as his wont was, his rounded shoulders bringing his chin well over the dashboard.  As he passed down the long sandy street, toward the corner where his own house stood, the brooding group of loafers, waiting in Hackett’s store for the distribution of the mail, watched him through the open door, and from under the boughs of the weatherbeaten poplar before it.  Hackett had been cutting a pound of cheese out of the thick yellow disk before him, for the Widow Holman, and he stared at the street after Mulbridge passed, as if his mental eye had halted him there for the public consideration, while he leaned over the counter, and held by the point the long knife with which he had cut the cheese.

“I see some the folks from over to Jocelyn’s, yist’d’y,” he said, in a spasm of sharp, crackling speech, “and they seemed to think ‘t Mis’ Mulbridge’d got to step round pretty spry ’f she did n’t want another the same name in the house with her.”