“It was wrong of you to urge silence on him. If he’s ever to be anything, he mustn’t be silent. A thing like that must be confessed and atoned for. Besides, he knew that I should know in the end. I couldn’t help it. I’ve felt that there was something wrong, something terrible behind it all!”
“And it has made you wretched—I see that. Why can’t you forget it? I should never have come back. It’s I who have ruined your happiness.”
“Oh, no, no! Think how infinitely worse it would have been if you had perished and I had known too late that he—that he had left you! I couldn’t have borne that.”
The passion of her tone moved him again, and for a moment he did not reply. He was keenly aware of her presence at his side, her delicate profile against the light mist that was rising like vapor about them, the curve of her brow and the oval of her pale cheek under the dusky sweep of the brown hair that waved upward under her wide hat, the meticulous simplicity of her dark dress, her grace and slightness.
She seemed so young, so girlish, and she was facing a situation so tragic and humiliating! Overton was himself a proud man, and he felt her humiliation, felt that he must lighten it.
“I’ve wanted to speak to you about this,” he managed to say at last. “You mustn’t think that he did something do unpardonable. It isn’t unpardonable to any one who’s ever been at the pole. No man has a right to expect too much from his fellows there, and”—he hesitated—“when a man drops behind, why, he’s got to perish. The stakes are too great, the price too much, to lose all for one life. I fell in my tracks, and it’s only fair to him to think that I should have stayed where I dropped. The expedition couldn’t be imperiled just for me. I wasn’t worth so much. He did what—well, what nine out of ten would have done in his place.”
She stopped and faced him, her large eyes dark with emotion.
“Did you leave Rayburn?”
He flushed under her eyes.
“That was different. Faunce was with me—there were three of us. It was different, of course.”