“I don’t know,” he answered her, hard-pressed, “how we are to bear this.”

She shrank away from him a little, as if at a glimpse of a surgeon’s knife.

“We are not to bear it,” she said eagerly.  “The rose is to tell you that.  I didn’t mean it, when I left it, to be anything more—­more than a rose; but now I do.  I didn’t even know when I came out tonight.  But now I do.  We aren’t to bear it, Hugh.  I don’t want it so—­now.  I can’t—­can’t have it so.”

She came nearer to him again and caught with her two hands the lapels of his coat.  He closed his own over them and looked down at her in that half-detachment, which still claimed and held her.

“Advena,” he whispered, out of the sudden clamour in his mind, “she can’t be—­she isn’t—­nothing has happened to her?”

She smiled faintly, but her eyes were again full of fear at his implication of the only way.

“Oh, no!” she said.  “But you have been away, and she has come.  I have seen her; and oh! she won’t care, Hugh—­she won’t care.”

Her asking, straining face seemed to gather and reflect all the light there was in the shifting night about them.  The rain had stopped, but the wind still hurtled past, whirling the leaves from one darkness to another.  They were as isolated, as outlawed there in the wild wet wind as they were in the confusion of their own souls.

“We must care,” he said helplessly, clinging to the sound and form of the words.

“Oh, no!” she cried.  “No, no!  Indeed I know now what is possible and what is not!”

For an instant her eyes searched the rigid lines of his face in astonishment.  In their struggle to establish the impossible she had been so far ahead, so greatly the more confident and daring, had tempted him to such heights, scorning every dizzy verge, that now, when she turned quite back from their adventure, humbly confessing it too hard, she could not understand how he should continue to set himself doggedly toward it.  Perhaps, too, she trusted unconsciously in her prerogative.  He loved her, and she him:  before she would not, now she would.  Before she had preferred an ideal to the desire of her heart; now it lay about her; her strenuous heart had pulled it down to foolish ruin, and how should she lie abased with it and see him still erect and full of the deed they had to do?

“Come,” he said, “let me take you home, dear,” and at that and some accent in it that struck again at hope, she sank at his feet in a torrent of weeping, clasping them and entreating him, “Oh send her away!  Send her away!”