"No, that's not fair; I must speak first and you must let me. It's my privilege."
"With the others maybe, but not with me. What I have to say has to be said before I hear. Esther, do you know what it is?"
She was silent, her head drooping, her hands growing cold in his grasp. He went on, very quietly and simply:
"It's that I ask you to be my wife. And I must ask it before the clearing or vindicating or any rubbish of that sort. I don't know what you'll say to it and I don't want any answer now. That's at your own good time and your own good pleasure. It's just that I wanted you to see how I stand and have stood since that night when we walked through the woods together. Come along now—it's nearly three, and we mustn't keep them waiting."
It was a very different Esther who sat in Wilbur Whitney's private office, facing those who had once been her accusers. She gave no evidence of rancor, greeted them with a frank friendliness, smiled with a radiance they set down to the rebound from long tension and strain. Suzanne, her jealous fires burned out, could acknowledge now that she was handsome; Mr. Janney wondered at her look of breeding. "A fine girl," old Whitney thought, as he studied her through his glasses, "spirited and high-mettled as a racer."
"It's a long story," she said, "and for you to understand it I'll have to go back to a time when none of you had ever heard of me. And before I begin, I want to say to Mrs. Janney," she turned to the older woman eagerly earnest, "if I had understood people better, if I hadn't been hardened and made suspicious by the struggle I'd had, I would have trusted you and told you more, and all this misery would have been averted. So, in a way it was my fault, and being such I've suffered for it.
"I have a half-sister, Florence Jackson, nine years younger than I am; that would make her eighteen. When my stepfather died, ten years ago, he left us penniless and I had to start in at once to make our bread. I boarded Florry out with friends and found a position as a school teacher. That was only for a year or two; soon I advanced into the secretarial work which was less fatiguing and better paying. In the first place I got, Florry was living near me and on Sundays she used to come and see me. My employer didn't like it—did not want a strange child about the house and told me so without mincing words. I was angry—I was hot-tempered and sensitive in those days and I made a vow to keep my life to myself, be nothing to my employers but a machine who rendered certain services for a certain wage. When I came to you, Mrs. Janney, I should have seen that I was with some one who was big-hearted and generous, but I had been molded and the mold had set in a hard and bitter shape.
"Earning more money I was able to put Florry in good schools. It was my intention to give her a fine education, and equip her for the task of earning her living. She was quick and clever, but willful and hard to control. I suppose it was because she had had no home influences, no place that belonged to her. She had to spend her vacations anywhere—sometimes at the school, sometimes with classmates. It was a miserable life for a child.
"She was always pretty—when she was little people used to stop on the streets to look at her—and as she grew older she grew prettier. She was charming, too, there was something about her very willfulness that was captivating. The combination worried me; if she had had more balance, been more reasonable, it wouldn't have mattered. But she was the kind who is always full of wild enthusiasms, going off at a tangent about this, that and the other. Not a promising temperament for a girl who has to support herself.
"A year ago I got her into a first class school near Chicago—I had met the principal, who had been very kind and taken her at a greatly reduced rate. It was to be her last year; in June she would graduate and with her education finished, I felt sure I could get her a position in New York where I could help her and watch over her. During the winter—last winter—her letters made me uneasy. She was discontented, tired of study, wanted to be out in the world doing something. I was prepared for a struggle with her, but not for what happened.