"You mean in not marrying Morgan?"
The girl nodded. "And in refusing to give Boone up. When he was in Louisville all the time, it was easier. I had his courage to lean on—but since he went back to plan his race for the legislature, I've felt very much alone and outnumbered. They are all so gently immovable. It's terrible to feel that your family are your enemies."
"And your heart refuses the thought of surrender?"
Anne looked at him quickly, and for her eyes he could no longer employ the Blue Grotto as a simile. The waters there are shallow, and in that moment of soul-unmasking he looked through her irises into deeps of feeling, sincere and unalterable, and far down under fathoms of slighter things into the basic pools of passion.
"You can hardly call it refusal," she said in a low voice, shaded with a ghost-touch of indignation. "I have never considered it."
"So I had hoped," he responded gravely, "but I owe you the frankness of admitting that I wasn't sure. On such subjects the boy has naturally been reticent. I could be sure only of how he felt. I wanted to see him get on, and I knew what your influence would mean to him. It has been what sunlight is to a place where the shadows lie too thick. In the mountains, my dear, cows that browse where the sun doesn't penetrate get 'dew poisoning.' Human beings get it from the milk. To both it is often fatal. There's dew poisoning in Boone's blood, too, from generations of brooding shadows. He needed you."
He paused, and she bent forward. "Yes," she prompted softly.
"So I was glad for every moment he had with you—glad enough, even, to endure the thought of what it might ultimately cost him in the usury of heartache."
"And you were willing to let him undergo the heartache?" Her voice perceptibly hardened. "I'm afraid that's a loyalty I can't understand."
"It's the loyalty of a soldier's faith in him," he responded briefly. "I believed that if he must go through the fire he would come out of it not slag, but good metal."