"No," said Pen. She had previously determined not to raise his hopes by telling him about Blanche Paglar until something had come of it.
There was a long silence between them, and Pen became wretcheder and wretcheder. When she could stand it no longer she put the bag down beside the fence and said in an offhand tone:
"Well ... I must be getting back ... I'll come again to-morrow night."
She started to walk away with her sedate air, but a little quicker perhaps than would suggest perfect calmness.
Before she had taken three steps he came after her. Pen broke into a run. He overtook her. Ah! if he had only taken her in his arms! But he only circled about her, spreading out his arms to bar her way.
"Pen, _Pen_, don't leave me!" he said imploringly. "That would be the last straw! ... Don't leave me to brood over my own hatefulness."
The pain in his voice arrested her. She forgot her own pain. As in a flash she had a clairvoyant glimpse of what he must be going through day after day, the resolute young man compelled to skulk in the woods, while his name was bandied about with the stigma of murder upon it.
"I'm a fool!" she said with a shaky little laugh. "To get sore ... I won't go."
"Oh, Pen, you're so good to me!" he groaned. "I'm a stubborn brute, Pen, I can't thank you properly. But Pen, I feel as if you were heaping a load on me that I'd never be able to struggle from under! But I ought not to feel that way, Pen."
Ever since he had got hold of that little name he could scarcely address five words to her without using it, and every time he spoke it he caressed it. Pen was reassured.
"Don't worry about how you ought to feel," she murmured. "Much better for us to quarrel than to make pretenses to each other. Besides a lot of that talk about doing things for people and earning their gratitude is false. A person has really no right to put another person under a debt of gratitude."
"The truth is, I'm afraid of you," he grumbled.
It was delicious to her to have him softened and faltering like this. "I'm afraid of you, too," she confessed. "How silly we both are!"
For a moment or two they were wildly and unreasonably happy, standing there in the bland moonlight close together but not touching. His face was in the shadow but Pen could feel his eyes stabbing her out of the dark. Her own went down. They were like reeds shaken in the same gust. In that moment Pen knew that whatever bonds might be upon him out in the world, he was hers. Still he did not speak; he did not draw her to him. In the end she had to wrench herself away from the magnetic attraction of his body, or else she must have flung herself into his arms.