her. “Dear! What is it?” he said, drawing her hands down, so that she had to turn her face to his.
“Nothing.… I don’t know … a superstition. I’ve been so happy here!”
“Is our happiness too perishable to be transplanted?”
She smiled and answered by another question. “You don’t mind doing it, then?”
Amherst hesitated. “Shall I tell you? I feel that it’s a sort of ring of Polycrates. It may buy off the jealous gods.”
A faint shrinking from some importunate suggestion seemed to press her closer to him. “Then you feel they are jealous?” she breathed, in a half-laugh.
“I pity them if they’re not!”
“Yes,” she agreed, rallying to his tone. “I only had a fancy that they might overlook such a dull place as Hanaford.”
Amherst drew her to him. “Isn’t it, on the contrary, in the ash-heaps that the rag-pickers prowl?”
There was no disguising it: she was growing afraid of her happiness. Her husband’s analogy of the ring expressed her fear. She seemed to herself to carry a blazing jewel on her breast—something that singled her out for human envy and divine pursuit. She had a preposterous longing to dress plainly and shabbily,
to subdue her voice and gestures, to try to slip through
[ 475 ]
