“I didn’t wish to make anything of you but what you were; what you had always been until father tied you hand and foot with that horrible debt of gratitude. Then he sent you out here, and I knew what would happen—what simply must happen; how your gratitude to him would break you down, first in the little things, and then in the terrible ones. And that was why I persuaded him to come, and to bring me. Was it all very—unwomanly, David?”
“It was the finest thing a woman ever did for the man she loved. But you have always done the fine things.”
“Even when I made you fall in love with me when you didn’t want to?”
“I outdistanced you by many miles in that,” he said with sober gravity. “I think it went back to the kiddie days in old Middleboro.”
“In spite of Judith?”
He held her closer. “That is the one thing that I have to confess, Vinnie. I did go about a good bit with Judith, in my college years and before. We were just good chums, and I never thought for a moment——”
“Of course you didn’t! But I don’t blame Judith, either; I can’t, when I’ve done the same thing myself. But you were saying it went back to the kiddie days with—with me.”
“Yes; but I didn’t realize it until we met in Florida. I was full of hope then: I meant to make a success of myself so that I might go to your father like a man and say, ‘I want to marry your daughter.’ Then the big debt fell on me, and I couldn’t say anything while I owed your father more than I could ever hope to repay.”
“If you hadn’t died—we are both just the same as dead, aren’t we?—if you hadn’t died, you were going to pay him in the best possible way; by making ‘the apple of his eye’ deliriously happy, and by showing him the honest way out of all the little crookednesses and the big ones, too. Oh, yes; that was what was going to happen. After we were married he would have taken you into the company, and in just a little while you and I together would have been setting the pace; the good old-fashioned, honest pace. Isn’t it the pity of all pities that we had to go and die and spoil it all?—that we couldn’t have lived to make it come true, David, dear?”
“God!” he said under his breath, but for other reply there were no words.