"Then we'll put it off. Do you see? That isn't what I came back for. I came back about Teddy, and we must see that through before we think of ourselves. All that'll keep—"
"It won't keep if we go and live together."
"Then we won't go and live together—not till we see how it's to be done. That's just a detail. In comparison with Teddy, it doesn't matter one way or another. We'll come to it by and by. All we've got to think of now is that there's a boy whose life is hanging by a thread—"
"Yes; but I don't want you to be mixed up in it. I want to—to save you from—from the sacrifice—and—and the disgrace."
He stood back from her with a hard little laugh.
"Good God! Jennie, I wonder if you have the faintest idea of what love is! You can't have. Do you suppose it matters to me what I'm mixed up in so long as it's something that touches you? Listen! Let me explain to you what love is like when it's the kind I feel for you. I"—he braced himself in order to bring out the words forcibly—"I don't care what Wray is to you or what you are to Wray—not yet. I put that away from me till I've gone with you through the things you've got to meet. They'll not be easy for you, but I want to make them as easy as I can. No one can do it but me, because no one cares for you as I do."
"Oh, I know that."
"Then, if you know it, Jennie, don't force anything else on me when I'm doing my best not to think of it. Let me just love you as well as I know how till we do the things that are right in front of us. After that, if there's a reason why I should hand you over to Wray, or to anybody else, you can tell me, and I'll—"
Pansy's scrambling to attention and a sound on the stairs arrested his words as well as Jennie's rising tears.
"Momma's coming down," the girl whispered, hurriedly. "She wants to see you. Don't forget that you're not to mind anything she says."