“Oh, I think the place is beautiful. Already I have become very fond of it. You must love every stick and stone within sight.”
“There was one while I didn’t,” Martin drawled slowly. “But afterward, when I saw ’twas my duty to stay here, I got to feelin’ different. I’d ’a’ liked to have gone to the war. I was too old, though; besides, I had my sisters.”
“I know,” murmured Lucy with quiet sympathy. “You see, I had to make my choice, too. My aunt wrote that she needed me. It 185 wouldn’t have been right for me to desert her and go to France to nurse other people.”
“So it’s because of her you’re stayin’ here?”
“Yes.”
Martin did not speak again for some time; then he said in a tense, uneven voice that struggled to be casual:
“If she was to die then, I s’pose you’d start back West where you came from.”
“I’m—not—sure.”
He waited as if expecting her to explain herself, and presently she did so.
“I might decide to make my home here,” she went on. “That is, if I could get some one to help me with the farm.”