"That you will take the child."
I think now that we must both have spoken like puppets talking by machinery. I hardly seemed to myself to be alive and real, but this proposition awoke me like a blow. I could at first only gasp, too much overcome to bring out a word.
"But its mother?" I managed to stammer at last.
"If I'm to marry her for the sake of the child," he answered in a voice I hardly recognized, "it would be perfect tomfoolery to leave it to grow up with the Brownrigs. If that's to be the plan, I'll save myself. Jule doesn't mind not being married. You don't know what a tribe the Brownrigs are. It's an insult for me to be talking to you about them, only it can't be helped. Is it a boy or a girl?"
I told him.
"And you think a girl ought to be left to follow the noble example of the mother!"
"Oh no, no!" I cried out. "Anything is better than that."
"That is what must happen unless you take the poor thing," he said in a voice which, though it was hard, seemed somehow to have a quiver in it.
"But would she give the baby up?" I asked. "She's its mother."