Cristel counted the strokes.
"Seven," she said. "Are you determined to keep your engagement?"
She had repeated--in an unsteady voice, and with a sudden change in her
color to paleness--the strange question put to me by Gloody. In his case
I had failed to trace the motive. I tried to discover it now.
"Tell me why I ought to break my engagement," I said.
"Remember what I told you at the spring," she answered. "You are deceived
by a false friend who lies to you and hates you."
The man she was speaking of turned the corner of the new cottage. He
waved his hand gaily, and approached us along the road.
"Go!" she said. "Your guardian angel has forgotten you. It's too late
now."
Instead of letting me precede her, as I had anticipated, she ran on
before me--made a sign to the deaf man, as she passed him, not to stop
her--and disappeared through the open door of her father's side of the
cottage.
I was left to decide for myself. What should I have done, if I had been
twenty years older?
Say that my moral courage would have risen superior to the poorest of all
fears, the fear of appearing to be afraid, and that I should have made my
excuses to my host of the evening--how would my moral courage have
answered him, if he had asked for an explanation? Useless to speculate on
it! Had I possessed the wisdom of middle life, his book of leaves would
not have told him, in my own handwriting, that I believed in his better
nature, and accepted his friendly letter in the spirit in which he had
written
Explain it who can--I knew that I was going to drink tea with him, and
yet I was unwilling to advance a few steps, and meet him on the road!
"I find a new bond of union between us," he said, as he joined me.
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