“I saw Mr. Gordon cross the clearing. He has told you why we are living here?” she said.
“I think,” said Nasmyth, with a slowness that was very expressive, “it was not done out of unkindness.”
“Oh, no,” and Laura smiled in a rather curious fashion, “he had probably quite another motive.” Then she leaned forward a little, looking at him steadily. “I knew that he would tell you.”
Nasmyth stood still, with his forehead deeply furrowed, and an unusual gravity in his eyes. The girl’s courage and serenity appealed to him, and he was conscious that his heart was beating rapidly. He said nothing, for a moment or two, and afterwards remembered how still the little room was, and how the sweet, resinous scent of the firs flowed in through the open window. Then he made a vague gesture.
“There is, perhaps, a good deal one could say; but I fancy most of it would savour of impertinence,” he said. “After all, the thing doesn’t affect you in any way.”
Laura glanced down at her hands, and Nasmyth guessed what she was thinking, for they were hard, and work-roughened. The toil that her hands showed was, as he realized, only a part of her burden.
“I think it affects me a very great deal,” she declared slowly.
Then a curious compassion for her troubled the man. She was young and very comely, and it was, he felt, cruelly hard on her that, bearing her father’s shame, she must lead a life of hard labour at that desolate ranch. He felt an almost uncontrollable desire to comfort her, and to take her cares upon himself, but that was out 44 of the question, since he was merely a ranch-hand, a Bush-chopper, who owed even the food he ate and the clothes he wore to her. There is, as he realized then, after all, very little one can do to lighten another’s load, but in that moment the half-formed aspirations that she had called into existence in his mind expanded suddenly. There was, he felt, no reason why he should not acquire money and influence, once he made the effort.
“Miss Waynefleet,” he said haltingly, “I can only offer you my sincere sympathy. Still”––and perhaps he did not recognize how clear the connection of ideas was––“I am going down to see about that dam-building contract to-morrow.”
Then Laura smiled, and took up her sewing again. Her burden, as she realized, was hers alone, but she knew that this man would no longer drift. She had called up his latent capacities, and he would prove his manhood.