“Are they dead?”
“They may be; I cannot tell.”
“This is all incomprehensible to me.”
“I suppose it is. I never asked any one to understand me.”
“Perhaps not,” said Gavin, excitedly; “but the time has come when I must know everything of you that is to be known.”
Babbie receded from him in quick fear.
“You must never speak to me in that way again,” she said, in a warning voice.
“In what way?”
Gavin knew what way very well, but he thirsted to hear in her words what his own had implied. She did not choose to oblige him, however.
“You never will understand me,” she said. “I daresay I might be more like other people now, if—if I had been brought up differently. Not,” she added, passionately, “that I want to be like others. Do you never feel, when you have been living a humdrum life for months, that you must break out of it, or go crazy?”