His dark face was as red as Dorothy's.

He made a motion towards her, then drew back and held up his head resolutely.
"It is a pleasant day," he said, as if they were exchanging the everyday courtesies of life; and then when she made no reply, he added that he hoped she was quite recovered from her sickness.
And then he was pressing on again, white in the face now and wrestling fiercely with himself that he might, as it were, pass his own heart which stood in the way; but Dorothy rose up, with a sob, and pressed before him, touching his arm with her slender one in her lace sleeve, and shaking out like any flower the rose and lavender scent in her garments.
"I want to speak to you," she said, and strove in vain to command her voice.
Eugene bowed and tried to smile, and waited, and looked above her head, through the tree branches into the field.
"I want to know if--you are angry with me because--I would not--marry Burr," said Dorothy, catching her breath between her words.
"I told you that you had no reason--that he was not guilty," Eugene said, with a kind of stern doggedness; and still he did not look at her.
"I could not marry--him," Dorothy panted, softly.
"I told you you had no reason," Eugene said again, as if he were saying a lesson that he had taught himself.
"Are you angry--with me because I could not marry him ?" Dorothy asked, with her soft persistency in her own line of thought, and not his.
Then Eugene in desperation looked down at her, and saw her face worn into sweet wistfulness by her illness, her dilated eyes and lips parted and quivering into sobs, like a baby's.
"I am not angry, but I encourage no woman to be false to her betrothal vows," he said, and strove to make his voice hard; but Dorothy bent her head, and the sobs came, and he took her in his arms.
"Are you angry with me ?" Dorothy sobbed, piteously, against his breast.
"No, not with you, but myself," said Eugene.

"It is all with myself.
I will take the blame of it all, sweet," and he smoothed her hair and kissed her and held her close and tried to comfort her; and it seemed to him that he could indeed take all the blame of her inconstancy and distrust, and could even bear his self-reproach for her sake, so much he loved her.
"I would not have married Burr--even if--he had told me--he was innocent," Dorothy said, after a while.

She was hushing her sobs, and her very soul was smiling within her for joy as Eugene's fond whispers reached her ears.
"Why ?" said Eugene.
"Because--you came first--when you looked at me in the meeting-house," Dorothy whispered back.

Then she suddenly lifted her face a little, and looked up at him, with one soft flushed cheek crushed against his breast, and Eugene bent his face down to hers.
They stood so, and for a minute had, indeed, the whole world to their two selves, for love as well as death has the power of annihilation; and then there was a stir in the lane, a crisp rustle of petticoats and a hiss of whispering voices; and they started and fell apart.
There in the lane before them, their eyes as keen as foxes, with the scent of curiosity and gossip, their cheeks red with the shame of it, and their lips forming into apologetic and terrified smiles, stood Margaret Bean and two others--the tavern-keeper's wife and the wife of the man who kept the village store.
For a second the three women fairly cowered beneath Eugene Hautville's eyes, and Margaret Bean began to stammer as if her old tongue were palsied.