Agnes expected to be followed. Instead of going directly home she made a wide detour, skirting the town, and ascended the west hill obliquely by a path the mill workers used. Nobody would think to look for her there.
She meant to enter the grounds by the main gate, defiantly, but she would take her time. As for the consequences,—well, the worse the better. Any change would be welcome.
What made the feud with her father unendurable was its monotony. She had meant to fight it out with him alone to the end, with no outside help or interference. That was the true impulse of her nature. But it had begun to be like fighting it out with some colossal stone image. What terrified her was nothing he did, or could do, but the sheer glacial mass of his hostility. No,—not hostility. It was something else. It was a kind of malevolent indifference.
The feud was about nothing. It rested on their mutual obstinacy. A word would deliver her. That word she could not utter, or would not, which is all the same matter.
At school she had been one of ten girls suspected of having taken part in a frolic much more exciting than wicked yet deserving the extreme penalty. The[145] nine denied it. When she was asked she said yes, she had done it. When they asked who the others were she refused to tell. They disciplined her. Still she refused. They offered her immunity if she would tell. She refused all the more. They sent for her father. He rashly said he would make her tell, and walked head-on into an impassable wall. After an hour alone with her in the reception room he marched her off, just as she was, saying as he crossed the threshold that her things were to be sent after her. Defiance was something he knew little about. Disobedience he could not comprehend at all. All the way home he pondered it.
“I understand why you refuse to tell on the others,” he said. “Now I waive that. You do not have to tell on them. But you shall tell me you are sorry.”
She wouldn’t. She would say she was wrong; she had broken rules. But she would not say she was sorry, for the reason that she wasn’t. This she explained. That made no difference.
“You shall tell me you are sorry,” he said.
She refused.
“You will,” he said. “When you do you may have your liberty again.”
With that he banished her beyond the white line that had divided the household in her infancy, set a woman to be her keeper, and then apparently forgot her. She sometimes saw him at a distance. He never looked at her.
The girls on whom she would not tell sent her a beautiful present. She sent it back. That was the[146] last of her contacts with the outside world. Her mail was ............