She gave a start, and raised her head. He was looking down at her with a faint smile in his eyes, a smile that struck her as being whimsical and yet curiously wistful also.
"I just want to tell you, my girl," he said, "that you're not to be scared of me any more. Reckon you've had a hell of a time all your life, but it's to come to an end right now. For the future, you do the asking and I the giving. You're boss, and don't you forget it! I'm your man, not your master, and I'll behave accordingly. Guess I'll even lie down and let you kick me if it'll make you happy any."
Maud was gazing at him in open amazement long before he had finished his astounding speech. The slow utterance, half-sad, half-humorous, was spoken with the full weight of the man's strength of purpose. Every word came with the steady force of unwavering resolution. There was a touch of the superb about him even with that unlighted pipe between his teeth. And every word seemed to pierce her with a deeper pain, pain that was well-nigh unendurable.
As he uttered the last deliberate sentence, she rose quickly with a gesture of protest. She could bear no more.
"Jake, you--you--you hurt me!" she stammered incoherently.
He put out a hand to her. "No--no!" he said. "That was not my intention."
It was almost as though he pleaded with her for some species of clemency. She was sure she read entreaty in the red-brown eyes. But she could not lay her hand in his. She could not--she could not! She stood before him panting, speechless, shaken to the very foundations of her being.
His hand fell. "I just want you to be happy, my girl, that's all," he said gently; "happy after your own notions of happiness. Maybe there ain't room for me in the general scheme of things. If that's so,--I reckon I'll stay outside."
He turned aside with the words and struck a match to kindle his pipe with the air of a man who has said his say. Then while she still watched him, he puffed a great cloud of smoke into the air, straightened himself, and made her an odd, clumsy bow.
"I'm going now. So long!" he said.