Part 13

"My soul isn't bound," returned Rosemary, softly, "but it would have been, if it hadn't been for you."

"I? Why, my dear girl, what have I done?"

"Everything. Think of all the books you've loaned me, all the candles you've given me--all the times you've climbed this steep hill just to talk to me for an hour and give me new strength to go on."

"It's only selfishness, Rosemary. I knew you were here and I like to talk to you. Don't forget that you've meant something to me, too. Why, you're the only woman I know, except my mother."

"Your mother is lovely," she returned. "I wish I could go to see her once in a while. I like to look at her. Even her voice is different someway."

"Yes, mother is 'different,'" he agreed, idly. "It's astonishing, sometimes, how 'different' she manages to be. We had it out the other day, about the vineyard, and I'm to stay here--all the rest of my life," he concluded bitterly.

"I don't see why, if you don't want to," she answered, half-fearfully. "You're a man, and men can do as they please."

"It probably seems so to you, but I assure you it's very far from the truth. I wonder, now and then, if any of us ever really do as we please. Freedom is the great gift."

"And the great loneliness," she added, after a pause.

"You may be right," he sighed. "Still, I'd like to try it for a while. It's the one thing I'd choose. What would you take, if you could have anything you wanted?"

"Do you mean for just a little while, or for always?"

"For always. The one great gift you'd choose from all that Life has to give."

"I'd take love," she said, in a low tone. She was not looking at him now, but far across the valley where the vineyard lay. Her face was wistful in the half-light; the corners of her mouth quivered, ever so little.

Alden looked at her, then rubbed his eyes and looked at her again. In some subtle way she had changed, or he had, since they last met. Never before had he thought of her as a woman; she had been merely another individual to whom he liked to talk. To-day her womanhood carried its own appeal. She was not beautiful and no one would ever think her so, but she was sweet and wholesome and had a new, indefinable freshness about her that, in another woman, would have been called charm.

It came to him, all at once, that, in some mysterious way, he and Rosemary belonged together. They had been born to the same lot, and must spend all their days in the valley, hedged in by the same narrow restrictions. Even an occasional hour on the Hill of the Muses was forbidden to her, and constant scheming was the price she was obliged to pay for it.

The restraint chafed and fretted him, for her as much as for himself. It was absurd that a girl of twenty-five and a man of thirty should not have some little independence of thought and action. The silence persisted and finally became awkward.

"It's the book," said Rosemary, with a forced laugh. She was endeavouring to brush her mood away as though it were an annoying cobweb. "I've grown foolish over the book."

"I'm glad you liked it," he returned, taking it from her. "I was sure you would. What part of it did you like best?"

"All of it. I can't choose, though of course some of it seems more beautiful than the rest."

"I suppose you know it by heart, now, don't you?"

"Almost."

"Listen. Isn't this like to-day?"

"Spring's foot half falters; scarce she yet may know The leafless blackthorn-blossom from the snow; And through her bowers the wind's way still is clear."

Rosemary got to her feet unsteadily. She went to the brow of the hill, on the side farthest from the vineyard, and stood facing the sunset. Scarcely knowing that she had moved, Alden read on:

"But April's sun strikes down the glades to-day; So shut your eyes upturned, and feel my kiss----"

A smothered sob made him look up quickly. She stood with her back to him, but her shoulders were shaking. He dropped the book and went to her.

A strange, new tenderness possessed him. "Rosemary," he whispered, slipping his arm around her. "What is it--dear?"

"Nothing," she sobbed, trying to release herself. "I'm--I'm tired--and foolish--that's all. Please let me go!"