Brent turned away and left her there and it was a full two hours later before he met her and led her, passive enough now, to a place from which they overlooked that river that, not long ago, they had ridden together. Under his gently diplomatic prompting she found relief in unbosoming herself.
"He war all I hed——" she rebelliously declared. "An' whilst he lived thet war enough—but now I hain't got nothin' left."
After a little she broke out again. "I hain't a woman—an' hain't a man. I hain't nuthin'."
"Alexander," said Brent gently, "when I looked at your father's face in there, I was thinking of what Parson Acup once told me. He said that if your father had been a wishful man,"—he used the hill phrase for ambition quite unconsciously, "he could have gone to the Legislature. Perhaps to Congress."
"I reckon he mout ef hed any honors he craved," she replied. "Folks was always pesterin' him ter run fer office."
The man looked off across the valley which was so desolate now and which would soon be so tenderly green; so tuneful with leaf and blossom.
His eyes were seeing a vision and some of it he tried to voice.
"Suppose, Alexander, he had gone. Suppose he had taken his seat in Congress, instead of staying here. He would have become a figure trusted there, too—but how different your life would have been. There would have been schools and—well, many things that you have never known."
"I hain't hankerin' fer none of them things," she said. Then with a sudden paroxysm of sobs that shook her afresh, she added, "All I wants is ter hev him back ergin!"
But Brent was thinking of things that could mean little to her because she lacked the background of contrast and comparison. He was seeing that beauty and that personality in the social life of official Washington; seeing the triumph that would have been hers—and wondering what it would have meant to her in the balance of contentment or unhappiness.