there were miles between us.

I sat still, without impulse to move a finger. I lived essentially. Now I
knew what had come to me. It was no merely idiosyncratic experience, for
the youth had the same: it was love! How otherwise could we thus be drawn
together from both sides! Verily it seemed also good enough to be that
wondrous thing ever on the lips of poets and tale-weaving magicians! Was
it not far beyond any notion of it their words had given me?

But my uncle! There lay bitterness! Was I indeed false to him, that now
the thought of him was a pain? Had I begun a new life apart from him? To
tell him would perhaps check the terrible separation! But how was I to
tell him? For the first time I knew that I had no mother! Would Mr. Day's
mother be my mother too, and help me? But from no woman save my own
mother, hardly even from her, would I ask mediation with the uncle I had
loved and trusted all my life and with my whole heart. I had never known
father or mother, save as he had been father and mother and everybody to
me! What was I to do? Gladly would I have hurried to some desert place,
and there waited for the light I needed. That I was no longer in any
uncertainty as to the word that described my condition, did not, I found,
make it easy to use the word. "Perhaps," I argued, struggling in the
toils of my new liberty, "my uncle knows nothing of this kind of love,
and would be unable to understand me! Suppose I confessed to him what I
felt toward a man I had spoken to but once, and then only to tell him the
way to Dumbleton, would he not think me out of my mind?"

At length I bethought me that, so long as I did not know what to do, I
was not required to do anything; I must wait till I did know what to do.
But with the thought came suffering enough to be the wages of any sin
that, so far as I knew, I had ever committed. For the conviction awoke