"What I wish to know is only one thing," she rejoined. "Not offering terms, I want to know what is the alternative you have proposed. Let us see if we can not reason calmly over this matter." She also was suddenly cold and pale. The hand of a swift terror was upon her now.
"You ask me to reason, and I answer I have no reason left. You ask me what I propose, ask what we should do, and I answer I do not know. But also I know that if you left me, I should never see you again."
"But what difference, then? You are, I presume, only my new constable."
"There could be no social chance for me—I've ruined that. You would exact defeat of me as surely as you met me, there."
"Social chance?—Social—! Well, the bon Dieu! And here you exact defeat for yourself. But what defeat? Come, your speech sounds more personal than professional. What can you possibly think yourself to be, but my new jailer?"
"I'm not so sure. Look, each turn of the wheels takes us farther away from the places where society goes on in its own grooves. Out here we manage the world in our own ways."
Unconsciously the eyes of both of them turned down the river, along which the boat now steadily continued its course. He went on somberly.
"Out there," he said, pointing toward the west, "out beyond the big river, there's a place where the wilderness sweeps. Out there the law is that of the old times. It is far away."
"How dare you speak in such way to me?" she half whispered, low and tense. "And you claim manhood!"
"No," he said, sighing. "I—claim nothing. I deny nothing. I assert nothing—except that I'm going to be not your Jailer, but your keeper. Yes, I'm going to hold you, keep you! You shall not get away. Why," he added, pacing apart for a moment. "I have no shame left. I've planned very little. I thought I might even ask you to be a guest at my own plantation. My place is out on the edge of the world, thirty miles back from the river. An amanuensis is as reasonable there as on this boat, in the company of a frontier army man."