To this at
first she assented--it seemed to me, even eagerly. But I had
scarcely taken forty paces up the road before I heard her voice
calling me back, and back I went obediently.
"O husband," she said, "the dusk has fallen, and now in the dusk I
can say a word I have been longing all day to be free of. Nay"--she
put out a hand--"you must not forbid me. You must not even delay me
now."
"What is it, that I should forbid you?"
"It is--about Brussels."
I dropped my hand impatiently and was turning away, but she touched
my arm and the touch pleaded with me to face her.
"I have a right. . . . Yes, it was good of you to refuse it; but you
cannot go on refusing, because--see you--your goodness makes my right
the stronger. This morning I could have told you, but you refused
me. All this day I have known that refusal unjust."
"All this day? Then--pardon, Princess--but why should I hear you
now, at this moment?"
"The daylight is past," she said. "You can listen now and not see my
face."
On the hedge of the ditch beside the high-road lay a rough fragment
of granite, a stone cracked and discarded, once the base of an
olive-mill.
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