"An understanding like ours," he said, hurriedly, "may be superseded—wiped out by a better understanding." With an eagerness that seemed strange to himself, he tried to soothe and reassure her.
His heart shrank at her unlighted look.
"Do you hear, Val? We are not so primitive that we must make a fetich of our compact."
"I'm very primitive, dear; you told me so yourself."
He loosed his hold upon her with a sinking sense of having done something he could never quite undo. Feeling his arms no longer about her, she looked up.
"Poor darling!" she said, framing the dark face in her two hands; "I didn't mean to cry and unnerve you. But it wasn't for me I cried—not even for you. You ought to forgive me that a few tears fell, just this once, over those other graves that nobody will ever remember any more."
He stared down at her, seeing how unmoved his words had left her.
"Haven't you heard what I've been saying to you, dear?"
"What was it?" she said, wearily, putting out her hand to take up another of the faded water-colors. He caught the hand, lifted her in his arms, and carried her to the big chair. He sat, holding her against him, thinking how he should put it to her—this new, this growing sense of his, that the family will to live was stronger than his individual will to die, and that there was justification in this realization for a different compact. He sat weighing the chances of the new life, trying for Val's sake to find loop-holes of escape from the prison he himself had builded, for Val's sake coercing himself to face payment of the long penalty of life and guilty fatherhood; in Val's name even trying to think all might still be well.