The drop in his voice had told Judith far more than his avowal, and she could not endure it in silence. "Ann was fond of my brother—of both my brothers," she said dryly.
Baird had winced; so she knew all that history, doubtless far better than he did. Then his jaw set, and he quoted her own words, "But she's young and so am I. And as I'm good at both fighting and waiting, I generally win out."
"I hope you will," Judith said, with an instant return to her usual manner. "There is no one whom I'd rather see happy."
After the first flash of anger Baird forgave her the thrust. He had been rather brutal. Still it had been a necessary brutality; unless there was a distinct understanding, he could not continue his visits. Baird judged that Judith would not again swerve from the attitude she had adopted, and he was right. He genuinely liked and admired Judith Westmore. He admired the strength of will that enabled her to go on playing the role she had chosen; she was a pretty splendid sort. And he was profoundly sorry for her; she'd had a beastly hard row to hoe, and had hoed it well. He took off his hat to her!
But Baird did not take his depression and his fears to Judith. When he was "down," he rode for miles into the country, often until late at night. He thought continuously of Ann. He was convinced that she had been a more potential factor in the Westmore tragedy than any one dreamed. Baird wondered endlessly whether Ann was not suffering as much from remorse as from grief. He had long ago decided that she was both elusive and compelling, the type that gives little and receives much, the sort of woman who drives a man to fight for all he receives. Certainly two men had struggled for her, and, Baird was convinced, had died because of her. And he himself! He had fought for her against death itself, and was still fighting.... Well, he liked to fight; he had never treasured anything that came easy.
From the beginning of time men have yielded to the women they think potential, a fascinated interest that may or may not be love. Certainly when coupled with desire it is an irresistible force. When allied to tenderness, it is the blind worship which has urged men to most of the chivalrously romantic acts in history.
Baird told himself that he had sensed the potential in Ann, on the day when he had captured a kiss. She had drawn him away from Judith and had compelled him even when he knew perfectly well that her thoughts were with one or the other of those two. She had compelled him to put up the stiffest fight he had ever made, an actual grapple with death. It might seem to others that he was infatuated with a girl of no importance whatever, but he knew better: Ann's surroundings were an accident—by right of innate superiority, she belonged to Judith's class, and Edward had realized that, too. No, he was held and compelled and overwhelmingly in love with a potential woman.
Perhaps Baird was simply laboring under the hallucination usual with lovers, which urges them to swathe the objects of their affection with an interest quite indiscernible to the sane-minded. Possibly the tragedy in which Ann was involved and the fact that she almost certainly owed her life to him had touched an imaginative strain in him. It is more likely that, like Edward, he was a shrewd judge of character and that, despite her youth and her simple rearing, Ann did possess potentiality; that eventually she might even emerge a gifted woman.
However that may be, certainly no lover came into the presence of the woman he loved with more profound sensations than stirred Baird when at last Ben brought him to Ann. "You can come on in," Ben said. "She says she wants to thank you."
When Baird's eyes leaped to her, he lost the power of speech, for illness and grief had worked havoc: they had thinned her face until it looked small and pinched, had set immense circles about her eyes, destroyed the softness of lips and chin; her hair appeared to be the only unchanged thing about her, a black mass crowning the pillow.