Stead’s eye brightened, and taking her hand that was not busy with the apple and rested on the stump, he held it between his own. He himself did not analyze his motive, simply it gave him comfort and secured her attention. Then he said earnestly, solemnly it seemed to the girl, from whose eyes the merry banter of a few minutes before had passed, “Listen, Brooke, brave woman, who is fighting out her own problems to the shame of others such as I.
“When I was turning thirty and engineering a railway through a mountain region of the south, I met and loved a woman as heartily as a man may, but the passion seemed one-sided. She had given me a final answer, and I was preparing to go away, as gossips whispered there was ‘some one else,’ when the next day she recalled the no and made it yes.
“I was almost beside myself with surprise and joy, and after a brief month we were married, for my work was ended and I was going North. For ten years we led a charmed sort of life, a little girl soon coming to share it with us. We three, with José always as attendant, travelled wherever my work lay, sometimes living in houses, sometimes in tents, but always happy. Then the first grief came to me (it is nearly twelve years since)—my little Helen died, down near Oaklands, where we were summering. The illness came like a shot in the dark, without warning, and Dr. Russell, whom I then met for the first time, was powerless.
“After this my wife began to droop and grew sadder day by day. This was natural except for the fact that she sought to be alone and avoided me, until one day in a fit of bitter melancholy she told me the secret that had lain between us like a sword all through those married years.
“When I had first met her she had a lover, a wild, hot-blooded, handsome fellow of the south mining country,—for him she refused me! At the same time, unknown to her, he had committed a crime and the law was on his track. He took refuge, as they thought he would, in her vicinity, and she was watched to see if she would take him food or shelter him. To foil them she betrothed herself to me, and thus disarmed, the watchers left, and her lover escaped scot free.”
“But why didn’t she go too, or follow him?” interrupted Brooke.
“Because what she called her sense of honour forbade her, and she never meant that I should know,—she was willing to pay the price of the scamp’s life with her peace of mind.”
“How she must have loved him!” said Brooke, tears trembling in her voice; “I don’t see how she could have lived it down. To save the man you love by marrying another, even if it was the only way—oh, I am not brave enough to do such a thing, and so I must not judge her!”
For a moment a startled expression crossed Stead’s face, as if this side of the matter had never occurred to him; but again self conquered.