“Then—”
“Don’t!” he interrupted. “Don’t ask me!”
“It is my right to know,” she repeated.
“I know it,” he again interrupted. “But I cannot tell you.”
“You have not considered me, Chris,” she went on gently.
“I know, I know,” he broke in.
“You cannot have considered me. You do not know what I have to bear from my people because of you.”
“I did not think they felt so very unkindly toward me,” he said bitterly.
“It is true. They can scarcely tolerate you. They do not show it to you, but they almost hate you. It is I who have had to bear all this. It was not always so, though. They liked you at first as... as I liked you. But that was four years ago. The time passed by—a year, two years; and then they began to turn against you. They are not to be blamed. You spoke no word. They felt that you were destroying my life. It is four years, now, and you have never once mentioned marriage to them. What were they to think? What they have thought, that you were destroying my life.”
As she talked, she continued to pass her fingers caressingly through his hair, sorrowful for the pain that she was inflicting.