Sabine Bob strode to the cringing girl, seized her by the shoulders, forcing her up roughly against the back of the chair, and broke out with a ruthless laugh:
"Must! Must! You don't say so! And why, tell me, must he marry you?"
The white girl raised her eyes for one instant to the other's face; and there was a look in them of mute pleading and confession, a look that was like a death-cry for pity. The look shot through Sabine's turgid consciousness like a white-hot dagger. She staggered back as if mortally stricken, supporting herself against a tall cupboard, staring at the girl, whose head had now sunk to the table again and whose body was shaking with spasmodic sobs. It was one of the moments when destinies are written.
At such moments we act from something deeper, more elemental, than will. The best or the worst in us leaps out—or perhaps neither one nor the other but merely that thing in us that is most essentially ourselves.
Sabine stared at the poor girl whose terrifying, wonderful secret had just been revealed to her, and she felt through all her being a sense of shattering and disintegration; and suddenly she was there, beside Tina, on the arm of her chair; and she brought the girl's head over against her bosom and held her very tight in her eager old arms, patting her shoulders and stroking her soft hair, while the tears rained down her cheeks and she murmured, soothingly:
"Pauvre petite!" and again and again, "Pauvre petite! Ma pauvre petite!"
Tina abandoned herself utterly to the other's impassioned tenderness; and for a long time the two sat there, tightly clasped, silent, understanding.
Sabine Bob had no word of blame for the unhappy girl. Vaguely she knew that she ought to blame her; very vaguely she remembered that girls like this were bad girls; but that did not seem to make any difference. Instead of indignation she felt something very like humility and reverence.
"Yes, he must marry you," she said at last, very simply and gently.