His thoughts turned inevitably to the glade. He had a whimsical idea that his trouble would all seem easier if he could but talk it over with Jinny. Deep down, however, he knew better. Not even to that faithful listener could he have voiced the longing of his whole nature for Helen Anderson. He cherished the thought of her in his secret heart, going over, minute by minute, the hours they had spent together. Each word of hers, each look, gesture, had its special power of endearment!
What if he were to tell her the whole story, would she believe him? Would she consent to go away with him into a new life? He could realize enough from the mine to make such a life full of rich possibilities, and there were far countries enough!
But what sort of a man would it be, who could ask the woman he loved to help him live a lie? He asked himself the question and awoke to a realization of his further folly. What right had he even to dream of her—to imagine that she could ever care for him at all? Even though he should stand before her without a shadow in his past he would be a brave man who dared raise his eyes to her. How could he, of all men?
Then he remembered Westcott. He had seen with his own eyes that he dared. Could that man ever hope to win her?
The torture of this thought drove him out over the desert at noon, when the sky closed brassy-yellow above him, and the heat-reddened air over the sand seemed the hue of his own thoughts. He fought his way through it to peace, far out in the open, when the afternoon wind was driving the heat of the plain skyward, and seaward over the mountains, and he came back against that cleansing breath, his wonted strong self, to a conference with Kate Hallard. She was bitter against Westcott that day, breathing out wrath, and the desire for vengeance.
“If you’ve ever noticed it,” Gard said, “there’s a kind of reasonableness in the way things happen, even when they look black. They happen out of each other; and there’s Something managing them, no matter how it looks, sometimes. I’ve found that out.”
“I’d like to help in the managin’,” Mrs. Hallard said, grimly.
“You couldn’t.” Gard shook his head thoughtfully.
“You couldn’t see the whole scheme,” he continued. “And we don’t need to want to. Whoever’s doing it is making up a whole piece out of ’em. That’s this world we’re in. It’s our world. We belong in it; and there ain’t anything in it for us to be afraid of but just ourselves.”
He pondered his own saying for a moment, repeating it as if to reassure himself.