"I do!"
Flaming scorn and a smile as defiant as Mrs. Garrison's own.
"Do you?" said the surgeon. "Then release him."
"You told a lie. Notely does not want to be released. He loves me, not Grace Langham. You know how it is with men. If I should go to your house and say to him, 'Come with me; come down to my father's house, since there is no other way, and help troll, and haul the traps, and make the nets, and be with me,' he would come!"
"Yes," said the lady, pale, "he would go. Therefore, as I said, do you save him."
"What makes that life so much better, out there, than ours, that I should give him up to it, and break my heart and his? Are you one that they make?"
"All people do not regard me with such disfavor." She looked at the girl almost wistfully. "Life is hard, Vesta, and exacting, spite of all that we can do; and the world is hard and exacting, supercilious, ready to pick at a flaw—you do not know."
"Well, I think Notely will be happier here with me."
Yet one could see the girl's pale resolve, only she was turning the knife a little on the heartless surgeon. It cut sharply.
"For a month or two, Vesta, yes."