The girl's laugh rang harshly through the roar of the hail. "I don't know. What does that matter, anyway? Can't you understand? The wheat will all be cut down. I have ruined Charley."
Then there was a lull for a minute or two, and Carrie, reaching up a hand, gripped her companion's arm.
"Did you ever hear how much I cost my husband?" she said.
Terrified as she was, Eveline Annersly started at the question. It was not expressed delicately, but, after all, there was no doubt that the girl's marriage had been more or less a matter of bargaining. "Of course not," she said.
"I don't know, either, but I'm sure it was ever so much," and Carrie's fingers trembled on her arm, though her eyes were fierce. "In one way, I am glad it was. I like to feel that he was willing to offer everything that was his for me. It isn't in the least degrading to belong to Charley Leland, however I came into his possession. Not in the least. How could it be? Still, once it seemed horrible even to think of it."
She stopped a minute with a little indrawing of her breath. "Besides, I am glad in another way, because, if he is really ruined, I am going to get all I cost him back again. Jimmy and my father would call it a loan."
Eveline Annersly was distinctly startled, though she understood that all restraint had been flung aside, and Carrie Leland had responded to the influence of this storm that had brought her face to face with a crisis in her husband's affairs, the raw human nature in her had come uppermost, and she was for the time being merely a woman with primitive passions raised, ready to fight for her mate. It was, her companion recognised, a thing that not infrequently happened—a part, indeed, of Nature's scheme that had a higher warrant; but, for all that, she was sensible again that there was in the girl's set face something from which people of fastidious temperament, who had never felt the strain, might feel inclined to shrink.
"Carrie," she said, "the thing is out of the question. They are your father and brother. You cannot force them into an open rupture. You must put it out of your mind."
The girl gripped her arm cruelly. "One must choose sometimes, and I am my husband's flesh and blood. Once that seemed a curious fancy, repugnant too, but it is real now—one of the great real things to Charley and me."
Eveline Annersly said nothing, and the wind beat upon the house as the girl went on. "Aunt," she said, "before Charley is ruined, I will make them repay the loan. They would have to if I insisted, for they would never dare let me tell that tale."