"Did you think it was I who fired?" he asked.
Then he went on with the horse, and she at the side.
She was utterly astonished. "Who, Ephraim—who fired?"
He looked straight in front of him again. "It was my mother. She brandished the gun in his face. She couldn't have intended to shoot."
From Susannah's heart a great cloud was lifted. She felt no confused need to readjust her thoughts; rather it was that in a moment her apprehension of Ephraim's character slipped easily from some abnormal strain into normal pleasure.
She pressed her hands to her breast as if fondling some delight. "Forgive me," she said, "but I am so glad, oh, so very glad." She drew a long breath as if inhaling not the autumn but the new sweetness of spring.
So they went on a little way, he somewhat shy because of her emotion, she meditating again, and this question pressed.
"And you think," she asked, "that your mother would receive me if I went back with you? that I could live at peace with her?"
"Do you think that whatever I might do she would ever try to shoot me?" he asked with half a smile. "Do you think that she would ever, by word or deed, do anything that would hurt me?"
"Never." Susannah said the word as a matter of course.