“Different from us folks?” he asked, smiling at her understandingly. “Well, California folks are different from people around here. They’d have thought it was funny if you was like us.”
“And my wearing your wife’s dress.”
“I told ’em your trunk was lost. You had to have something to work around the house in.”
She was, in the end, unwillingly persuaded to a more hopeful point of view. But when she had gone up the stairs to her room Jeff sat for a long time, turning the newspaper in his hands, reading over and over that which was written there. She was so beautiful, so much more beautiful than anyone he had ever seen; and the gown she wore when she came to the farm had stamped itself upon his visual memory as a part of her beauty. That a reward of ten thousand dollars should have been offered for her discovery did not surprise Jeff; though it added to the glamour which cloaked her in his eyes.
“She’s worth more,” he told himself softly. “If she was mine I’d give a hundred times that much to get her back again.” And he thought of this husband of hers, whom she wished to torture, and wondered what he had done to her, and hated this man he had never seen because the woman hated him. “He’s not going to get her back,” Jeff swore in his thoughts. “If I can help her keep away from him he’ll not get her again.” There was nothing possessive in the feeling which was awakening in him. His devotion to her was a completely unselfish force.
It was also the most powerful emotion Jeff had felt in all his fifty-seven years.
IV
Will Belter stopped at the farm next morning, and lingered, talking with Jeff, watching furtively for a glimpse of the woman; asked at last, point-blank, if it was true that Jeff’s niece had come to visit him. He and Jeff were on the porch, outside the kitchen door; and Jeff nodded and, raising his voice, called to the woman, who was inside. He called her by his niece’s name.
“Mary!”
She came slowly to the door, dreading this contact with a stranger.