She smiled a little. "You don't seem like a stranger; you seem like an old, old friend."
"I'm glad. Because I am an old, old friend in reality, you know."
"But, if—if I—when I want—" she hesitated.
"Oh, you don't know where to find me if you want me?" He laughed. "It's true that I am an uncertain quantity, but I take supper at the hotel every evening, and sometimes I go to the post-office afterwards." He smiled roundly at that, and she smiled, too. "We must go to the post-office together, sometimes," he added; "it's the great social diversion of Ledge." He was glad to see her face and manner getting easier. That was what he was trying for—to lift the weight from her.
"Alva took me there this morning," she said.
They came now to the Soldiers' Monument and the tracks.
"I hope that she isn't going to mind the way that I left her!" the young girl exclaimed suddenly, smitten with anxiety. "I ran away, you know; I couldn't bear it another minute."
"She won't mind that," said Ingram; "all the little things of life won't cut any figure with her any more, if she's the kind that has made up her mind to do such a thing. That's what I've been thinking all the time that we were coming along; a woman who has decided to marry in the way that Alva has, must of course look at everything in life by a different light from that of the rest of us; I don't know really that we have the right even to criticize her. We don't understand her at all; that's all it is."
Lassie looked astonished. "You don't mean to say that you think that she isn't crazy?" she said.
Ingram smiled again, "I mean that I hardly think it possible to judge what one cannot measure; savages reverence the Unknown, you know, and I'm not sure that reverence is not a fitter attitude towards mystery than condemnation or ridicule, although of course it isn't the civilized or popular standpoint."