The Girl's voice trailed off as if she were too weary to speak further, while she leaned her head against a pillar and gazed with dull eyes across the lake.
“And your question,” suggested the Harvester at last.
She roused herself. “Oh, the question! Why this——if in time, and after she had tried and tried, love to equal his simply would not come would——would——she be wrong to PRETEND she cared, and do the very best she could, and hope for real love some day? Oh David, would she?”
The Harvester's face was whiter than the Girl's. He pounded the chisel into the joist savagely.
“Would she, David?”
“Let me understand you clearly,” said the man in a dry, breathless voice. “Did she love this first man to whom she came under obligations?”
The Girl sat gazing across the lake and the tortured Harvester stared at her.
“I don't know,” she said at last. “I don't know whether she knew what love was or ever could. She never before had known a man; her heart was as undeveloped and starved as her body. I don't think she realized love, but there was a SOMETHING. Every time she would feel most grateful and long for the love that was offered her, that 'something' would awake and hurt her almost beyond endurance. Yet she knew he never would come. She knew he did not care for her. I don't know that she felt she wanted him, but she was under such obligations to him that it seemed as if she must wait to see if he might not possibly come, and if he did she should be free.”
“If he came, she preferred him?”
“There was a debt she had to pay——if he asked it. I don't know whether she preferred him. I do know she had no idea that he would come, but the POSSIBILITY was always before her. If he didn't come in time, would she be wrong in giving all she had to the man who loved her?”