“I’m so sorry,” he murmured humbly. “I didn’t mean it for your ears. I wouldn’t have said it—then—if I had known you were eavesdropping. You’re much too fine, Tamea, to have this happen to you, but I know Dan Pritchard. You are not the woman for him. Maisie Morrison is.”
“Perhaps those are true words, Stoneface. I do not know men of your race too well. Yet it is certain that some day a man will seek me and I will be glad of the seeking. Many have sought me already, but you must understand, Stoneface, they were not gentlemen. Ah, but you do not understand. . . you do not know how much I wish to be all white. . . how my heart hurts because here, where I am alone, I must be alone always because I—am—different.”
He was overwhelmed with sympathy and possessed himself of her hand and patted it, but without speaking.
“You like me, do you not, Stoneface?” she pleaded.
“You are wonderful—transcendently beautiful—you have a mind and a heart and a soul.”
“And you like me—a very little?”
His grip on her hand tightened. “God help me,” he murmured huskily. “I love you. I am like a man smitten with a plague.”
“Yes, you love me. I was quite certain of that, only you told me the eyes were not admissible as evidence. You did not think I could stir a heart of stone and see love and longing in Stoneface, no? But I saw it, and I have not wished it, for I have not liked you. And now will I make you humble. You shall seek the love of the woman you would not wish your friend to take to wife—no, no, I dishonor you, Stoneface.
“Forgive, please. You would not seek it, but you shall yearn for it with a great yearning that shall cause you to forget that in my veins flows an ancient and alien blood. Stoneface, know you that if half of my blood is dark it is not the blood of the unbeautiful or the base. It is the blood of the kings and patriarchs of a lost race that is dying because, in its innocence, it touched hands with the vilest of living things, the white man civilized. No, I am not ashamed of my blood. I am proud of it and I rejoice that it has given me a weapon to humble you.”
She grasped his hands and drew him toward her. “Look at me, Stoneface,” she commanded. But he turned away his heavy, impassive face. “Ah, look at me,” she pleaded now, “and let me see again in those strange, stern eyes the look that was there when you betrayed yourself into my power. For I have power—over men. I know it. It is not to brag, to show a large conceit, when I admit it—to you. . . . Come, look at me, Stoneface.”