She stopped, her face burning in uncertainty of the meaning of her words.
Rankin’s answer came with the swiftness of one who has meditated long on a question. “I’m glad you’ve given me a chance to say what—I’ve wished you might know. I thought it over and over at the time—and since—and I’m sure it would not have been honorable—or delicate—or right, not to leave it all to you. That much was yours to decide—whether you would take the first step. It would have been a crime to have hurried or urged you beyond what lay in your heart to do—or to have overborne you against some deep-lying, innate instinct.”
Lydia’s voice was shaking in self-pity as she cried out, “Oh, if you knew what the others—nobody else was afraid to hurry or urge me to—”
She stopped and looked away, her heart beating rapidly with a flood of recollections. Rankin’s lips opened, but he shut them firmly, as though he did not trust himself to speak. His large red hands closed savagely on the handle of his tool-box. There was a silence between them.
The car began to move more slowly, and the conductor, standing up from the seat where he had been dozing, remarked in a conversational tone to a woman with two children near him, “Gardenton—this is the cross-roads to Gardenton.” Later, as the car stood still under the singing vibration of the trolley-wire overhead, he added in the general direction of Lydia and Rankin, now the only passengers, “Next stop is Wardsboro’!” His voice came to them with a singular clearness in the quiet of the momentary stop. They were in the midst of a mournful expanse of bare ploughed fields, frozen and brown. The motorman released his brake, letting the brass arm swing noisily about, the conductor sat down again, and as the car began to move forward again he closed his eyes. He looked very tired and, now that an almost instant sleep had relaxed his features, pathetically young.
“How pale he is,” said Lydia, wishing to break the silence with a harmless remark. “He looks tired to death.”
“He probably is just that,” said Rankin, wincing. “It’s sickening, the way they work. Seven days a week, most of them, you know.”
“No; I didn’t know,” cried Lydia, shocked. “Why, that’s awful. When do they see their families?”
“They don’t. One of them, whose house isn’t far from mine, told me that he hadn’t seen his children, except asleep, for three weeks.”
“But something ought to be done about it!” The girl’s deep-lying instinct for instant reparation rose up hotly.