Yet that it
was not for him she had been crying was proved by the very first word
she spoke.
"I only came out to tell you definitely it's impossible! I have thought
over everything, taking plenty of time--over and over; and that is my
answer, finally, positively. You must take it--you shall have no other."
Basil Ransom gazed, frowning fearfully. "And why not, pray?"
"Because I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't!" she repeated passionately,
with her altered, distorted face.
"Damnation!" murmured the young man. He seized her hand, drew it into
his arm, forcing her to walk with him along the road.
That afternoon Olive Chancellor came out of her house and wandered for a
long time upon the shore. She looked up and down the bay, at the sails
that gleamed on the blue water, shifting in the breeze and the light;
they were a source of interest to her that they had never been before.
It was a day she was destined never to forget; she felt it to be the
saddest, the most wounding of her life. Unrest and haunting fear had not
possession of her now, as they had held her in New York when Basil
Ransom carried off Verena, to mark her for his own, in the park. But an
immeasurable load of misery seemed to sit upon her soul; she ached with
the bitterness of her melancholy, she was dumb and cold with despair.
She had spent the violence of her terror, the eagerness of her grief,
and now she was too weary to struggle with fate. She appeared to herself
almost to have accepted it, as she wandered forth in the beautiful
afternoon with the knowledge that the "ten minutes" which Verena had
told her she meant to devote to Mr.
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