"Isn't it pretty?" she said, looking suddenly up and catching his eye watching her.
"I thought you hadn't cared much for it," he answered, greatly pleased. He had always known she would have preferred a smaller heart if crusted with diamonds.
Gore longed to laugh. She astonished and puzzled him. Her cleverness was a revelation to him, and her good-nature, her subtlety, and her earnestness—for he knew she had been in earnest in what she said about not daring to interfere with other people's ways of getting to heaven.
"That old man who instructs her," he thought, "must have taught her a lot."
Of course, on his own account, he was no more afraid of Don Joaquin than she was. But he had been terribly afraid of the hard old man on Mariquita's, and he was deeply grateful to Sarella.
"Sir," he said, "what she has said to you I do feel myself. I am a Catholic—and the dearest of my sisters is a nun. I should have hated and despised any man who had tried to spoil her life by snatching it to himself against her will. He would have to be a wicked fellow, and brutal, and impious. God's curse would lie on him. So it would on me if I did that hideous thing, though God knows to-day has brought me the great disappointment of my life. Life can never be for me what I have been hoping it might be. Never."
Sarella, listening, and knowing that the two men were looking at each other, smiled at her bangle, and softly shook the dangling heart to make the crystal give as diamond-like a glitter as possible. Gore's life, she thought, would come all right. She had done her best valorously for Mariquita; women, in her theory, behooved to do their best for each other against masculine tyrrany ("bossishness," she called it), but all the time she was half-savage, herself, with the girl for not being willing to be happy in so obviously comfortable a way as offered. It seemed to her "wasteful" that so pretty a girl should go and be a nun; if she had been "homely" like Sister Aquinas it would have been different. But Sarella had learned from Sister Aquinas that these matters were above her, and was quite content to accept them without understanding them.
"Ever since I came here," Gore was saying, "I have lived in a dream of what life would be—if I could join hers with mine. It was only a dream, and I had to awake."
Don Joaquin did not understand his mind, but he was able now to see that the young man suffered, and had received a blow that, somehow, would change his life, and turn its course aside.
"Anything," Gore said, in a very low, almost thankful tone, "is better than it would have been if I had changed my dream for a nightmare; it would have been that, if I had to think of myself as trying to pull her down, from her level to mine, of her as having been brought down. I meant to do her all possible good, all my life long. How can I wish to have done her the greatest harm? As it would have been if, out of fear or over-persuasion, she had been brought to call herself my wife who could be no man's wife."