He made his final statement with his eyes upon the ground. To see this great, honest boy bowed with such a sincerity of misery was too much for Phyllis.
"You didn't win my love, Frank," she said, with eyes that were tenderly smiling. "I gave it to you—quite unasked. I gave it to you such a long—long time ago. I think I must sure have given it you before ever I saw you. And—and as for my promise, I guess that was given most at the same time—only I just didn't know 'bout it. I don't think I could take my promise back if I felt that way. But I don't—not if you'd like to keep it."
"Phyl, Phyl!" The boy's eyes were shining, but his sense of right made him protest. "You don't know what you're doing. You surely don't. Think of it. I—I have no real name. Think what folks'll say when they know. Think of the disgrace for you. Think of your girl friends. Phyllis Raysun marrying a—bastard. Oh, it's awful."
"You do love me, Frank, don't you?"
The girl's question came so simply that Frank turned in astonishment. The next moment she was in his arms, and the joy of his hot kisses pervaded her whole body.
"Love you? Love you?" he cried. "You're all the world to me."
Presently she released herself from his embrace and smiled up into his face.
"Then what in the world else matters to—us?" she demanded frankly.
Then she went on, looking straight before her at the tumbled-down sod house which had been her home ever since her birth.
"Listen," she said. "You are illegitimate. I won't have that other word. It's brutal, and it's not right anyway. Do you ever think of our poor little lives? I do—often. Guess I've thought so much I wonder folks make all the to-do they do about lots of things that can't possibly matter. What is life? Why, it's a great big machine sort of thing that none of us, the wisest, don't know a thing about. Why is it? Where does it come from? What is it? Is it? No, not the wisest man in all the world can answer one of those questions right. He can't. He can't. And yet everybody gets busy making crazy little regulations for running it. Do you see? We're built and developed by this wonderful, wonderful machine thing, and then we turn right around and tell anybody, even, yes, the wonderful machine thing that made us itself, how we should live the life which has already been arranged for.