"I don't believe it. I can't. You wouldn't have done it. It's I you're promised to. Haven't I your word? Haven't you been kind as an angel to me when the others would have let me die out here like a dog? What did you do it for if you didn't care?"
"I was sorry," and then with cold, measured slowness, "and I felt guilty."
"That's it—you felt guilty. It's not your doing. You've been led away. While I've been sick that devil's been poisoning you against me. He's tried to steal you from me. But you're not the girl to let him do that. You'll come back to me—the man that you belong to, that's loved you since the day we started."
To her at this naked hour, where nothing lived but the truth, the thought that he would take her back with the other man's kisses on her lips, made her unsparing. She drew back from him, stiffening in shocked repugnance, and speaking with the same chill deliberation.
"I'll never come back to you. It's all over, that love with you. I didn't know. I didn't feel. I was a child with no sense of what she was doing. Now everything's different. It's he I must go with and be with as long as I live."
The hideousness of the discovery had been made the night before. Had her words been his first intimation they might have shocked him into stupefied dumbness and made him seem the hero who meets his fate with closed lips. But hours long he had brooded and knew her severance from him had taken place. With the mad insistance of a thought whirling on in fevered repetition he had told himself that he must win her back, urge, struggle, plead, till he had got her where she was before or lose her forever.
"You can't. You can't do it. It's a temporary thing. It's the desert and the wildness and because he could ride and get water and find the trail. In California it will be different. Out there it'll be the same as it used to be back in the States. You'll think of this as something unreal that never happened and your feeling for him—it'll all go. When we get where it's civilized you'll be like you were when we started. You couldn't have loved a savage like that then. Well, you won't when you get where you belong. It's horrible. It's unnatural."
She shook her head, glanced at him and glanced away. The sweat was pouring off his face and his lips quivered like a weeping child's.
"Oh, David," she said with a deep breath like a groan, "this is natural for me. The other was not."
"You don't know what you're saying. And how about your promise? You gave that of your own free will. Was it a thing you give and take back whenever you please? What would your father think of your breaking your word—throwing me off for a man no better than a half-blood Indian? Is that your honor?" Then he was suddenly fearful that he had said too much and hurt his case, and he dropped to a wild pleading: "Oh, Susan, you can't, you can't. You haven't got the heart to treat me so."