An upward glance had caught him smiling. Her speech was routed. “I’m—the—only girl here!”
“Do you think that’s why I love you?”
“Ah, but you loved Gerty!” That slipped from her. She had not meant to say that!
“Does that hurt?” Abashed by her own daring, yet she was glad she had dared. She wanted him to deny it. For he would deny it? She wondered if he were angry, but she could not look at him.
The minutes, dragging like weighted hours, told her that he was not going to answer her. It came to her then that she would never know whether Gerty’s story were wholly false, or partly true. She knew, then, that no wheedling, wife’s or sweetheart’s, would tease that story from him. It did not belong to him.
His silence frightened her into articulateness. He must not think that she was foolish! It was not that, in itself, she meant. The words jostled one another in their soft swift rush. He—he had made a mistake once before. He had liked the sort of woman he had thought Gerty was. She herself was not like the real Gerty any more than she was like the other, the woman that did not exist. He would find that they did not think alike, believe alike, that there were differences—
“Aren’t you making something out of nothing, Innes?”
That voice could always chide her into silence! Her speech lay cluttered in ruins, her words like useless broken bricks falling from the wall she was building.
He took her hand and led her to a pile of rock the river had not eaten. He pulled her down beside him.
“Isn’t it true, with us?”