"Anything I have."
Vesty smiled. "Promise me, if Notely should be sick, in danger, I mean, or hurt, unfortunate, it might be—you would let me know, and let me come and care for him, just while he needed care. I want you to promise me!"
Her voice took the sharp tone, her eyes the frenzy, of a bird guarding its young.
"Ah, Vesta Kirtland, you did love him! Oh, I promise."
"If you did not, there 's such a feeling toward him, different from the others, I can't tell; if you did not, and I should ever know, it would be like I had some little child of my own—yes, like I had some poor little baby of my own, crying for me, and I did not come—I did not come!"
Vesty turned. The tide had run so high those wild ocean guards were covered by the surge.
She led the way to the outskirts of the wood and stood aside for Mrs. Garrison to pass. The woman would have drawn near her; she waved her hand, standing aside from her. Mrs. Garrison hesitated. The sight of Dan Kirtland's low, brown cottage, the squalid babies in the doorway, the fishing-nets, Vesty's last week's cotton gown swinging on the line, some humiliating, harsh memories of her own, spurred her on, with a sigh.
"She is fire, thank God! It will be all right," she said.
Vesty drew back into the woods.
She pressed her forehead hard against the rough bark of a tree. To "fall down there, and to be found and taken home and put away beside her own mother in the little home lot by the sea-wall—not to have to stand up wearily any more, and walk back, dazed and sick, into the light"—so she yearned—"what was there to stand up for?"