“No, it’s too late for that!” said Susan, clearing her throat.  “I’d rather know.”

If she had been acting it would have been the correct thing to say.  The terrifying thought was that she was not acting; she was in deadly, desperate earnest now, and yet she could not seem to stop short; every instant involved her the deeper.

“We—­we must stop this,” she said, jumping up, and walking briskly toward the village.  “I am so sorry—­I am so ashamed!  It all seemed—­ seemed so foolish up to—­well, to Tuesday.  We must have been mad that night!  I never dreamed that things would go so far.  I don’t blame you, I blame myself.  I assure you I haven’t slept since, I can’t seem to eat or think or do anything naturally any more!  Sometimes I think I’m going crazy!”

“My poor little girl!” They were in a sheltered bit of road now, and Bocqueraz put his two hands lightly on her shoulders, and stopped her short.  Susan rested her two hands upon his arms, her eyes, raised to his, suddenly brimmed with tears.  “My poor little girl!” he said again tenderly, “we’ll find a way out!  It’s come on you too suddenly, Sue—­it came upon me like a thunderbolt.  But there’s just one thing,” and Susan remembered long afterward the look in his eyes as he spoke of it, “just one thing you mustn’t forget, Susan.  You belong to me now, and I’ll move heaven and earth—­but I’ll have you.  It’s come all wrong, sweetheart, and we can’t see our way now.  But, my dearest, the wonderful thing is that it has come—–­

“Think of the lives,” he went on, as Susan did not answer, “think of the women, toiling away in dull, dreary lives, to whom a vision like this has never come!”

“Oh, I know!” said Susan, in sudden passionate assent.

“But don’t misunderstand me, dear, you’re not to be hurried or troubled in this thing.  We’ll think, and talk things over, and plan.  My world is a broader and saner world than yours is, Susan, and when I take you there you will be as honored and as readily accepted as any woman among them all.  My wife will set me free—–­” he fell into a muse, as they walked along the quiet country road, and Susan, her brain a mad whirl of thoughts, did not interrupt him.  “I believe she will set me free,” he said, “as soon as she knows that my happiness, and all my life, depend upon it.  It can be done; it can be arranged, surely.  You know that our eastern divorce laws are different from yours here, Susan—–­”

“I think I must be mad to let you talk so!” burst out Susan, “You must not!  Divorce—–!  Why, my aunt—–!”

“We’ll not mention it again,” he assured her quickly, but although for the rest of their walk they said very little, the girl escaped upstairs to her room before dinner with a baffled sense that the dreadful word, if unpronounced, had been none the less thundering in her brain and his all the way.

She made herself comfortable in wrapper and slippers, rather to the satisfaction of Emily, who had brought Peter back to dinner, barely touched the tray that the sympathetic Lizzie brought upstairs, and lay trying to read a book that she flung aside again and again for the thoughts that would have their way.