“Yes, yes, I will.”
“Nothing would ever separate us,” he said in a voice vibrating with emotion. “Nothing but your own free will. You are so fair and lovely; always a flower blooming amid dark surroundings.”
“Thank you,” she said gayly; “that is a pretty sentiment.”
With a smile of ineffable affection, he gently pushed her inside the door. “Go in, my darling; you will take cold. Don’t tire yourself with the cripples. Good-night.”
“Zeb,” he said, when he returned to the sleigh, “come up here, I want to talk to you,” and fishing under the wolfskin he drew her up and set her beside him.
“I think I’d like to be a reformer, Zeb, it’s so easy to go about telling other people what they ought to do. But when it comes home to self, that’s a different matter. Zeb, I’m not what I ought to be.”
“Yer a good man,” said the child half sulkily, “if there be’s any.”
“Thank you, little Zeb; would you mind saying ‘you’ instead of ‘yer’? Your mother talks good English, but yours is a little defective.”
“You, you,” repeated the child under her breath. “I’ll say it, doctor.”
He continued talking to her, but amid her brief remarks and the many stirring arrangements he made that evening for her comfort, there was before him all the time the ugly picture of the big, light-haired woman sitting by the fire, drinking her tea and drying her feet, her thick lips moving in the cynical, hardened fashion in which she had talked to him.