"Don't talk nonsense," said Mrs. O'Neil, severely.
The days which bore such momentous happenings upon their bosom flowed swiftly on, and the week was speeding by—was gone, in fact.
"It doesn't seem possible, does it?" Lassie said, as she came across the bridge with Ingram one afternoon. He had happened to return from the long-distance telephone in Ledgeville by way of Alva's house; and she had happened to be ready to go home, and Alva had happened not to be ready. "It doesn't seem that it can be only a week. I feel as if it were months, instead. Do you remember that first day, when Alva told me, how I cried and how horrible I thought it was. And now I feel as if it were too sad for words, but something so great and lovely and sacred, that I'm sort of hushed in joy to have seen it all. I can see her side now, and when I go back to the world and hear people say the things that I thought myself when she first told me, I know that they are going to hurt me awfully. And yet she says that they will not hurt her."
"No," said Ingram, thoughtfully, "she seems to be quite beyond being hurt. I never saw any one who impressed me just as Alva does."
"It's very wonderful to be with her all the time," Lassie went on; "nothing seems to affect her for herself, but only things about other people. She doesn't seem to think her thoughts for herself any more, but just for others. It's how she can study and learn and carry on some part of his work for him after he's gone; it's how she can teach the people around here that Ledge won't profit in the end by being turned into a big lake or a big manufacturing district; it's how she can only prove to people that those two queer women are really honest, and really nice to know."
"And do you agree with all her views now?" Ingram asked, recalling the first of their meetings and the difference in Lassie's views from her friend's then.
"I think it's very splendid how she loves. I thought it was terrible at first, but now I—" she hesitated; "I"—she stopped altogether.
"Go on," said Ingram; "what were you going to say?"
The girl looked down the cañon of gray, barren beauty, and then up towards the sunlit valley of sweet, sunshiny, farming country. "Perhaps you won't believe me," she said, her eyes for the minute almost as distant in their withdrawal as Alva's own; "but now, I—truly—I envy her. I would give anything to love as she does. I would almost give the world to see life as she sees it. You see, I have begun to understand what she means when she says things."
Ingram was deeply stirred by pathos of which Lassie herself was ignorant. The young desire to learn to drink of bitter waters! The longing towards the crown of thorns stirs them, because they can appreciate the sublimity of martyrdom, and cannot measure the agony!