"Which?" she demanded.
He turned to her full now, and put out a hand, touching the coverlid timidly almost. "You are ill," he said. "Your eyes shine. I know. It's the fever. It isn't any time now for you to talk. Besides, until you believe me, I can not talk with you any more. I've been a little rough, maybe, I don't know; but as God made this world, those trees, that sun yonder, I never said a word to you yet that wasn't true. I've never wanted of you what wasn't right, in my own creed. Sometimes we have to frame up a creed all for ourselves, don't you know that? The world isn't always run on the same lines everywhere. It's different, in places."
"Will you tell me all about it—about her, sometime?"
"If you are going away, why should you ask that? If you are going to be nothing to me, in all the world, what right have you to ask that of me? You would not have the right I've had in speaking to you as I have. That was right. It was the right of love. I love you! I don't care if all the world knows it. Let that girl there hear if she likes. I've said, we belong together, and it seems truth to me, the very truth; yes, and the very right itself. But some way, we hurt each other, don't we? Look at you, there, suffering. My fault. And I'd rather it had cost me a limb than to see you hurt that way. It cuts my heart. I can't rest over it. And you hurt me, too, I reckon, about as bad as anything can. Maybe you hurt me more than you know. But as to our rights to anything back of the curtain that's before us, before your life and mine, why, I can't begin until something else has begun. It's not right, unless that other is right, that I've told you. We belong together in the one big way, first. That's the premise. That's the one great thing. What difference about the rest, future or past?"
"You've not been much among women," she said.
"Very little."
"You don't understand them."
"I don't reckon anybody does."
"Jeanne told me that she heard, last night, a child crying, here in this house."
"Could it not have been a negro child?" He smiled at her, even as he stood under inquisition.