"I'm willing to take my skelping, if you'll cure me."
She laughed with a kind of girlishness that startled him.
"I've frightened you—that's enough. You're not much more like your father than I am, but when you've done wrong you've got to stand on the wrong and climb up."
"I'm trying to," he said. "If I talk like this to you it's because it's you, and there's only you that wants to hear. Only you and one other I'd tell it to."
Another listener might have heard her take a breath.
"Who's that?" she asked.
He faced her, troubled but unflinching. "You've seen her," he said, and his utterance of the words was like a song in praise of her.
"Yes," she said quietly, and covered her hands with her work.
He lay deeper in his chair, and watched the fire. His hands were thrust into his pockets, and his chin was dropped; his face had the lost look of one who has forgotten his bodily existence. He had forgotten Janet, but she, looking on him with a kind of hatred, loved every curve and line of him with a pure jealousy of passion. This was the son she had never had, yet felt she must have borne. She looked back, and believed she had held him naked to her breast. Yet it was with a sharp cruelty that she spoke. "Well, can you not get her?"
"No," he said, "not unless I stole her."