"I'm so sorry, big man," she whispered, in a small, choked voice. "It hurts me too."
He felt the warm moist touch of her lips on his cheek, the faint exhalation of her breath, and while his arms reached swiftly, instinctively to grasp and hold her close, she was gone. And this time she did not come back.
CHAPTER XI
A MAN'S JOB FOR A MINISTER
Having thus received a sad jolt through the medium of his affections, Mr. Thompson, like countless numbers of human beings before him, set about gathering himself together. He did a tremendous lot of thinking about things in general, about himself and Sophie Carr in particular. Moping in that isolated cabin his mind took on a sort of abnormal activity. He could not even stop thinking when he wanted to stop. He would lie awake in the silent darkness long after he should have been asleep, going over his narrow and uneventful existence, the unwelcome and anguished present, the future that was nothing but a series of blank pages which he had yet to turn in God only knew what bitterness and sorrow. That was the way he gloomily put it to himself. He had still to learn what an adaptable, resilient organism man is. This, his first tentative brush with life, with the realities of pain and passion, had left him exceedingly cast down, more than a little inclined to pessimism.
He experienced gusts of unreasoning anger at Sophie Carr, forgetting, as a man wounded in his egotism and disappointed in his first passionate yearning for a mate is likely to forget, that he had brought it on himself, that Sophie had not encouraged him, nor lured him to his undoing, nor given him aught to nourish the illusion that she was his for the asking.
Sometimes he would have a vivid flash of jealousy when he thought about her and Tommy Ashe, when he recalled her admissions. And he would soften from that mood, twisting his lips wryly, when he remembered the pitying tenderness of her good-by.
He could not in the least understand the girl nor her motives, any more than he could understand the transformation that he felt vaguely was taking place in himself. She was too wise for her years and her experience. There was a stinging truth in some of the things she said. And it was his fault, not hers, that they were unpalatable truths. What did a man like himself have to offer a girl like her? Nothing. She had his measure in everything but sheer brute strength, most of all in the stoutness of her resolution. For Mr. Thompson, pondering soberly, realized that if he gave free play to the feelings Sophie Carr had stirred up in him, there was no folly he was not capable of committing. He, whose official creed it was to expound self-denial, would have followed his impulses blindly. He would have married out of hand.