It seemed to him his lips were making words out of wood, and that the words were fatuously inefficient compared with what he should have said, or acted, under the circumstances.
She nodded. “It is. But the world doesn’t look at it in that way. Such things just happen.”
She reached for a book which lay on the table where the tundra daisies were heaped. It was a book written around the early phases of pioneer life in Alaska, taken from his own library, a volume of statistical worth, dryly but carefully written—and she had been reading it. It struck him as a symbol of the fight she was making, of her courage, and of her desire to triumph in the face of tremendous odds that must have beset her. He still could not associate her completely with John Graham. Yet his face was cold and white.
Her hand trembled a little as she opened the book and took from it a newspaper clipping. She did not speak as she unfolded it and gave it to him.
At the top of two printed columns was the picture of a young and beautiful girl; in an oval, covering a small space over the girl’s shoulder, was a picture of a man of fifty or so. Both were strangers to him. He read their names, and then the headlines. “A Hundred-Million-Dollar Love” was the caption, and after the word love was a dollar sign. Youth and age, beauty and the other thing, two great fortunes united. He caught the idea and looked at Mary Standish. It was impossible for him to think of her as Mary Graham.
“I tore that from a paper in Cordova,” she said. “They have nothing to do with me. The girl lives in Texas. But don’t you see something in her eyes? Can’t you see it, even in the picture? She has on her wedding things. But it seemed to me—when I saw her face—that in her eyes were agony and despair and hopelessness, and that she was bravely trying to hide them from the world. It’s just another proof, one of thousands, that such unreasonable things do happen.”
He was beginning to feel a dull and painless sort of calm, the stoicism which came to possess him whenever he was confronted by the inevitable. He sat down, and with his head bowed over it took one of the limp, little hands that lay in Mary Standish’s lap. The warmth had gone out of it. It was cold and lifeless. He caressed it gently and held it between his brown, muscular hands, staring at it, and yet seeing nothing in particular. It was only the ticking of Keok’s clock that broke the silence for a time. Then he released the hand, and it dropped in the girl’s lap again. She had been looking steadily at the streak of gray in his hair. And a light came into her eyes, a light which he did not see, and a little tremble of her lips, and an almost imperceptible inclination of her head toward him.
“I’m sorry I didn’t know,” he said. “I realize now how you must have felt back there in the cottonwoods.”
“No, you don’t realize—you don’t!” she protested.
In an instant, it seemed to him, a vibrant, flaming life swept over her again. It was as if his words had touched fire to some secret thing, as if he had unlocked a door which grim hopelessness had closed. He was amazed at the swiftness with which color came into her cheeks.