"I imagined as much," he said, dryly.
"Oh, well," she retorted, as he stopped before the brown cottage, "you would never have remembered to come! White Rosy would have had just one more thing on her mind!"
XIII
The result of Rosamund's increased determination was that, by the end of the week, a curiously assorted household was taxing the capacity of the cottage almost to the utmost. Grace Tobet, however, was not there. Rosamund had many long talks with her about other things; the poor soul had been miserably uneasy since the episode of the stone-throwing, and besought Rosamund to release her from her bond of silence. But that their friendship might bring trouble upon herself she denied, and when Rosamund tried to persuade her to take shelter in the brown house she would do no more than shake her head or raise the girl's hand to her own cheek in caress, or look off to the hills with unseeing eyes tear-brimmed, as on the first day she had spoken of her baby; and Rosamund could not urge her farther after that.
"It's often that a way," Mother Cary said, when Rosamund told her about it. "It binds 'em to a place faster than ropes could. You can break through most anything you can see, honey-bud; it's the things you can't see that you can't get away from. And they holds you all the tighter when they're the things you useter have and haven't any more—'specially little child'en."
Eleanor, too, had a word to say on Grace's side. "Can't you see, sweet, that if she leaves her Joe, she will be admitting his unworthiness?"
"But since he plainly is unworthy——?"
"What he is has very little to do with it. It is what she must believe him to be, as long as she can."
"How can she believe him to be anything that is good? He killed their baby—and you know very well that she has had to go through the woods all alone at night to warn him when the Government men are out."