The man at her side coughed, and she turned to him with a wan smile.
"I know," she said wearily. "You think I shouldn't talk of my husband to others ... but in all our married life I've never before had anyone to talk anything with.... Jim and I—Jim and I——"
"What I'm thinking, Mrs. Aikens," he interrupted gravely, "is that I'm the last one to whom you should speak of him."
She kept her eyes ahead of them on the dim line of the sand buttes, and they walked on in silence.
Suddenly a cry burst from her lips.
"I must speak, I must. My very heart is eating away with the strain of silence. I'll go crazy with the worry of it. It's about him—Jim. He's different—these days. At first—— Don't think there's any chance of Jim and me not—not sticking to each other. I've fought that out with myself already. He's changed, but I know what he can be—what he was once ... what he won't let himself be now. Why? I don't know. Something—something is crowding between us—crowding harder and harder every day, I see him so little now, and——"
The big man squared his shoulders and lifted his head.
"Mary Aikens, I'd do anything—pretty nearly anything to help you. You know that. But I can't help you in this. Please, please, don't ask me—don't say another word about him—not to me. It doesn't seem heartless, does it? It's as far from that as—as black from white. You've a heavier burden to carry than anyone I know ... and I don't know yet how it can be relieved. But it will be, it will be. I've that much faith in Providence. I shouldn't have said—that about marriage. Had you known—did you know all about him, you would at least bear one less trouble than you do, I'm sure of that. If I were you I wouldn't bother about that—not now. You're his wife. You should know whether he loved you once or not. And"—he ran his hand across his forehead—"as an onlooker with eyes, I can tell you that he loves you more than he ever did. Is that enough.... I believe—at this moment—he loves you better—better than you do him."
She gasped, and her hands tightened convulsively over the grass she carried.
"I still love him," she said deliberately.... "I think I do. What my love lacks is thrust there by—by the wall he is slowly building between us. I think he loved me, yes, but—it probably sounds foolish—I don't feel that he wants me to love him—not too much. He—sometimes seems to toss me aside—you've seen it. And Jim's not naturally brutal."