Why should she not simply tell him the truth—which was that she had accepted him in a misty state of mind when nothing had its right shape or size? that it was deplorable, but that with clearer eyesight marriage was out of the question? She did not want to marry any one. She wanted to go away by herself, preferably to some bleak northern moor, and there study mathematics and the science of astronomy. Twenty words would explain the whole situation to him. He had ceased to speak; he had told her once more how he loved her and why. She summoned her courage, fixed her eyes upon a lightning-splintered ash-tree, and, almost as if she were reading a writing fixed to the trunk, began:
“I was wrong to get engaged to you. I shall never make you happy. I have never loved you.”
“Katharine!” he protested.
“No, never,” she repeated obstinately. “Not rightly. Don’t you see, I didn’t know what I was doing?”
“You love some one else?” he cut her short.
“Absolutely no one.”
“Henry?” he demanded.
“Henry? I should have thought, William, even you———”
“There is some one,” he persisted. “There has been a change in the last few weeks. You owe it to me to be honest, Katharine.”
“If I could, I would,” she replied.
“Why did you tell me you would marry me, then?” he demanded.
Why, indeed? A moment of pessimism, a sudden conviction of the undeniable prose of life, a lapse of the illusion which sustains youth midway between heaven and earth, a desperate attempt to reconcile herself with facts—she could only recall a moment, as of waking from a dream, which now seemed to her a moment of surrender. But who could give reasons such as these
