"He must never know, he must never know," she said to herself.
She had never known what fear meant until she had looked on this man's face. Now she dreaded, with an intensity of apprehension, which made her start like a criminal at every sound, lest he should ever know of this gift of life which, unbidden, she had restored to him: this gift, which being thus given, her instinct told her he would only take as a burden of an intolerable debt of an unmeasurable shame.
"Perfect love casts out fear," runs the tradition: rather, surely, does the perfect love of a woman break the courage which no other thing could ever daunt, and set foot on the neck that no other yoke would ever touch.
By slow degrees he got from her such fragments of her obscure story as she knew. That this child, so friendless, ill treated, and abandoned, had been the savior of his own existence, he never dreamed. A creature beaten and half starved herself could not, for an instant, seem to him one likely to have possessed even such humble gifts as food and fuel. Besides, his thoughts were less with her than with the interrupted study on his easel, and his one desire was to induce her to endure the same watch upon her, awakening, which had had power to disturb her even in her unconsciousness. She was nothing to him, save a thing that he wished to turn to the purpose of his art—like a flower that he plucked on his way through the fields, for the sake of its color, to fill in some vacant nook in a mountain foreground.
"You have come often here?" he asked her, whilst she stood before him, flushing and growing pale, irresolute and embarrassed, with her hands nervously gathering the folds of her dress across her chest, and her sad, lustrous, troubled eyes glancing from side to side in a bewildered fear.
"Often," she muttered. "You will not beat me for it? I did no harm."
"Beat you? Among what brutes have you lived? Tell me, why did you care to come?"
Her face drooped, and grew a deeper scarlet, where the warm blood was burning.
"They are beautiful, and they speak to me," she murmured, with a pathetic, apologetic timidity in her voice.
He laughed a little; bitterly.